Here are a few topical thoughts on “disaster babies.” Disaster babies are a concept born from the observations of maternity wards that 9 months after a calamitous event, there tends to be an uptick in deliveries. The disaster could be anything: blizzards, blackouts, hurricanes, snowstorms, and more recently, pandemics.
The theory for this is simple: what else is a couple going to do with their time when the lights are out and Netflix isn’t available? This quartz article is a good history of the subject for those interested.
It’s an interesting concept — during extraordinary periods when people are forced to stay at home, this confinement becomes a catalyst for people to engage in something that they normally wouldn’t. And the results are often not apparent until months or years afterwards.
Our current pandemic has forced lots of universities like Harvard, MIT, etc. to disallow many students from returning to campus in the fall:
Here I wanted to theorize about an analogous situation for college students: where they are forced to stay home at the insistence of their prestigious, pricey, $50k/year university. What happens to a generation of ambitious, restless students in an environment like this?
I started thinking about this topic when recently approached by college students who aren’t thrilled with the idea of doing online classes at home for an entire year. Instead, trying a startup is an appealing alternative that could also be an incredibly valuable, low-risk learning experience.
This, I think, is a huge opportunity for both students and early stage companies to get people “together” to try ambitious projects. There are undergraduates at top tier schools I now have the opportunity to work with who I wouldn’t have even tried to recruit pre-covid because I would have no shot. These superstars typically are already thinking about their job offers at Google, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, etc. and looking forward to a normal senior year with their friends.
Instead we have a generation of students not content to sit at home and do online courses, the most ambitious of which turn to using what is a semi-gap year to try starting or joining a startup, even if informally. So we might see an unusual number of startups born from this current pandemic disaster that will reach fruition next year. Except this time around it won’t be hospitals that see the delayed effect — it will be the VCs who in 9 months, see an uptick in Series A-worthy opportunities.
We’ll see…
If you’re a rising junior, senior, or masters student studying computer science or mathematics and are interested in working on a project that involves novel applications of bitcoin/crypto, portfolio theory/optimization, and all aspects of derivatives, reach out to quadreciprocity@gmail.com. If you have no finance background, it’s not an issue. We’ll give you world class training in both the theory and practice of the field.
