The meeting of about 34 senior corporate venturing executives in the Covid-19 Venture Crisis Forum on Wednesday identified the global concern the disease from the Coronavirus is causing.

While the current attention is on the Coronavirus, deals are still happening.

Corporate venturing has always been a more collaborative part of financial services than most other areas and so it has been heartening to have so many of the industry leaders step up to share insights on how the current Covid-19 crisis might be eased or create new opportunities.

Kim Armor at Comcast Ventures showed why she was ranked so highly (#1) in the GCV Emerging Leader awards at the end of January after including Alphabet’s GV and Salesforce Ventures in an initial discussion last week on the Coronavirus and how it might impact their units and the broader industry. 

GE Ventures was the canary in the coal mine last year.

Desperate times can make for unusual measures.

Harvard Business Review’s (HBR) review of Black Swans author Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s follow-up book, Antifragile, nearly a decade ago summed up a useful way of responding and bringing flexibility back into decision-making: “Crises and major disruptions are not an abrupt departure from what anti-fragile organizations do continuously — solve problems. Rather than being controlled through rigid command structures, employees at all levels are trained every day to be quick problem-solvers.”

Global Corporate Venturing has had the honour of partnering with Telefonica’s corporate venturing unit, Wayra, and Spain-based IESE Business School professors Josemaria Siota and Julia Prats to shed light on the Latin American blind spot of collaborations between corporates and startups.

Impossible Foods, the US-based plant-based meat producer backed by internet and technology conglomerate Alphabet, has raised $500m – substantially more than the $300m to $400m it had been targeting – in part as the environmental impact of industrial-scale animal husbandry with its heavy use of antibiotics becomes clearer.

From complacency to fear can happen to people in seemingly an instant.