When I had the idea of ‘Panic With Friends’ a few weeks ago I thought I would make 10 episodes of the podcast and be done with it.

I am now three weeks in and have 40 episodes taped (32 are released and you can listen to them here). I can’t cover every single one here on the blog in realtime. I will eventually shout them all out here as I have been doing. My long time Norwegian friend from grad school, Knut Jensen (yes everyone in Norway is a Hans or Knut), gets more fan mail than me and has been a machine in the podcast studio he built in a week like a Norwegian MacGyver. He never thought his CLIO awards would lead to a third rate, part time, podcast gig during a Pandemic. Then again for an ASU student he is overachieving!

I have spent almost every waking moment the last month on zooms/calls with portfolio CEO’s as they raise capital, make incredibly difficult decisions and position for both a long grind and the other side of this pandemic (Mike Katz is the CEO of mParticle a fund 1 portfolio company and he just shared this strategy post titled ‘Live for Today, Plan For Tomorrow). My partners Tom and Gary have been zooming and phoning, turning documents and spreadsheets as well. In February, when I could sense the problems I was in New York helping face to face, but now I can only do it from my office on Zoom or the phone. My friend Semil, a venture capitalist as well,has a great post titled ‘Portfolio Triage in A Pandemic World‘. It’s a great overview of what we have been doing since February.

In the background I have Koyfin, Stocktwits and Twitter open 24/7 so I can follow the markets, chat with the community on Stocktwits and track COVID.

The podcast has consumed all my downtime but the upside has been a creative burst of energy.

I am grateful that my stomach and bowel issues came in November and not today so the hospital bed can go to someone that needs it more than me. I just got a second opinion (like Larry David) on my Crohn’s and after a battery of tests I am told that there are no signs of Crohn’s. Lucky Lindzon.

I am now just hopelessly staring at a few twitter streams like that of Bill Gates for any signs of news and data that feels trustworthy.

He had a great TED talk that I just watched and today linked to an Atlantic article titled ‘How The Pandemic Will End‘. I won’t paraphrase it because everyone should just take the time to read the whole thing.

It seems like April will be harder than March and we won’t get any semblance of order back until June. I will be having more guests on the podcast that can decipher the emerging trends from the COVID pandemic and panic.

The longer term effects and trends set in motion are mind boggling but part of my job is to get in front of these trends and back the best founders and teams with that will best ride them.