Editornote: Our writer Ritajourney from China to the U.S. and back again was planned months before the coronavirus pandemic descended on the world. That descent ended up turning a simple trip home into a kind of epic journey. The changes in her location — which we reference, but do not dwell on, to help anchor the story — gave her a unique perspective on the changing landscape — and outlook — of the world as COVID-19 infections spread. We&re publishing a diary of that period here in part to relay some of that first-person perspective to you, our readers. It goes without saying, but the tech angles run throughout, as they are running throughout all of our lives right now (whether or not we &work& in tech). Apps connect us more than ever at a time when we can&t physically be together, and they are now a critical lever in getting things done. Governments scramble to use tech to track whathappening — although surprisingly even what we think of as the most totalitarian efforts fall short in a crisis. And at the end of the day, the internet is where all our information is coming from. (IL)

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Departing

On the night of March 13, before my flight from Philadelphia back to China, my Airbnb host stopped by my room to say goodbye. I was squeezing a stack of masks and a few bottles of hand sanitizer into my suitcase. They were the remaining stock of coronavirus protective items that I panic-bought in early February as soon as I landed in the U.S. As Chinaproduction picked up speed, I gave away most of my supplies — which I had planned to bring back to my family in China — to friends and relatives in the U.S.

I had also asked my host, a slender, high-spirited botanist in her early fifties, whether she needed any supplies when I arrived at her house in early March. She gave a relaxed smile and said she wasn&t worried. There had barely been any cases in Philly, so there was no need. Plus, she had never worn a mask.

&People think you&re sick if you wear one,& she refused politely. &Why do people in Asia wear them?&

I explained that therea big debate on whether masks were necessary for the public. The consensus was that they were effective at preventing the transmission of COVID-19. Health officials in the West had for long recommended them only for patients or someone in contact with those who were sick, though the U.S. has recently moved to suggest mask-wearing for everyone in public.

In Asia, however, mask-wearing was a cultural norm even before the COVID-19 outbreak. Given the diseaseincubation period could be as long as 27 days, which meant many people could be unwitting carriers, wearing masks became an act of solidarity to protect others. Chinese cities had early on mandated mask-wearing in public. For me, they worked both as a placebo and a reminder not to touch my face.

Within a weektime, the disease had advanced rapidly across the U.S., adding dozens of new cases in Philadelphia. All large events were suspended, and my host suffered from a handful of canceled stays.

I decided to ask her again whether she wanted any protective products. &Yes, that&d be great. I don&t have any sanitizers with me. No masks, either.& Her eyes lit up this time. &But how do you wear one?&

I handed her the items and realized that I was about to flee coronavirus for the second time. When I planned my visit to the U.S. a few months back, I had not the faintest idea it would spiral into two great escapes: first leaving China where the disease just began to spread, and later leaving the U.S., where a similar crisis was taking form.

Weeks 1-2: Fears in parallel worlds

I was getting restless when I left for the U.S. some 50 days ago. Objectively speaking, my chances of contracting COVID-19 were slim. I was previously in lightly-hit cities like Taipei (which was an early mover in puttingeffective controlsin place). And 99% of the passengers on my flight departing Hong Kong had masks on. But the sum of uncertain events triggered by the epidemic — from abrupt changes in border controls to canceled flights without notice — elevated my anxiety.

Things felt uncannily normal in Texas when I arrived. It was three weeks before the U.S. reported its first community transmission in late February. None of the screening I anticipated was present at immigration: no temperature checks or even questioning if I had been in Wuhan, the Chinese city where the first coronavirus case appeared. I felt relieved and immediately chucked the mask I had worn on the plane. &Itsafe here,& I thought to myself, seeking solace in the sight of the bare-faced crowd, even though I knew my decision was largely prompted by the prejudice against masks in this part of the world.

My relaxation was short-lived. In fact, I would live the next eight weeks swinging between reason and paranoia.

The relatives and friends with whom I had planned to stay could no longer host me. Their employers, both of Asian descent, had introduced a new 14-day self-quarantine rule on staff who came into contact with visitors from China, even though Texas had no such regulation.

Technically, I could roam free, but fears among the local Chinese community were too visible. The digital tools that kept the diaspora emotionally close to home also distanced them from their physical reality abroad. Consuming a flood of fearmongering posts on WeChat, many Chinese expatriates began hoarding household products long before the U.S. saw an outbreak. Chinatowns became ghost towns. My mother was shocked to learn only Asians were wearing masks and messaged me daily saying I should wear one and avoid crowds.

I followed only the latter advice — avoiding crowds — and voluntarily opted for 14-day social distancing, not because I was scared of getting infected but because I was paranoid about passing it onto others asymptomatically. My compulsive information seeking in hopes of better understanding the epidemic only reinforced my angst. No silence I had dealt with felt as unbearable as the isolation amid the immense uncertainties that coronavirus brought to all of humanity.

Weeks 2-5: Coming to terms

When I finally allowed myself to resume socializing two weeks later, I would, out of courtesy, disclose to people that I had recently been in China. The reactions I received were a mixed bag.

Most of my American friends expressed sympathy for Chinasituation and were pleased I was in a safer place. A local dentist refused to see me until 21 days later — then the longest time for a patient to display COVID-19 symptoms — because he lived with someone who was frail. Some Chinese friends living in the U.S. jokingly congratulated me on my escape from the plague, which wasn&t my intention, but I admitted I was lucky. A fifty-something Chinese acquaintance avoided shaking my hand and gingerly asked how long I had been in the U.S.

I tried not to be bothered by peoplehint of mistrust. After all, their response was driven by the human instinct to survive. Trust had also eroded with the spread of the epidemic in China, where neighbors avoided conversations and a personsneeze in the elevator would make others cringe. Though understandable, these small shifts in behavior could take a toll on social interaction and peoplemental health in the long run.

By then, I knew I probably had a clean bill of health. It helped that Texas was run on wheels and I could easily practice social distancing walking on empty, tree-lined streets. As my mind restored to peace, and I moved to Philadelphia for the second part of my U.S. trip,I began to devour the expanding trove of Chinese-language writings on the disease; they were perhaps one silver lining behind the dark virus cloud.

Trapped indoors, Chinese people were forced to contemplate difficult questions — though sometimes leading to unintended consequences, like a rise in divorce cases. The unusual level of civic engagement and discussion sparked by the crisis provided some consolation. Stories of ordinary people fighting illness were vividly told by institutional and citizen journalists. The death of whistleblower Li Wenliang set off an unprecedented amount of anger on the internet. Another enthralling moment came when internet users rushed to preserve a censored interview using coded text.

The unusual, collective outcry against Chinese authorities soon gave way to a fragmented digital world. As Chinaheavy-handed lockdown began to bear meaningful results, online users rushed to trumpet the countrycontingency plan. Others submerged in the more mindless activities of mobile gaming and video streaming to pass time. Meanwhile, schools and businesses moved to resume digitally with IT support touted by private tech firms.

The offline world in China was also inching back to normalcy. Physical shops were allowed to reopen and restrictions on movement were being eased nationwide. People increasingly ventured out of their homes, taking masks off to sneak sips of fresh air when guards were out of sight.

For others, the daily routine hadn&t changed much, though life had become more precarious. While it was easy for high-earning professionals to attend virtual meetings and celebrate the remote working boom, those working in services, manufacturing and logistics had not been able to stay home but worked round the clock to sustain societylifeblood. They were also unlikely to have paid leave and many lacked employer-provided health insurance. As it turned out, this is just one manifestation of disparity exposed by the health crisis.

Week 6: The price of seeking safety

I knew China was on the horizon as soon as I arrived at my flightdeparture gate. The crowd was uniformly wearing some kind of a face protector. I hadn&t put one on yet. I had been adjusted to a maskless environment for weeks by then and it didn&t seem necessary to wear one during the layover in Chicago, where I cautiously kept a distance from others. There were barely any masked travelers at the airport other than the passengers en route to Hong Kong and Mainland China.

I put on one nonetheless in the spirit of solidarity. But others& ammunition of protective equipment immediately put me to shame. Many donned surgical gloves, some in lab goggles and even plastic rain ponchos, disinfecting any surface their bodies touched. Drinking water with my mask dangling off one ear now felt transgressive, not to mention I broke a taboo by having in-flight meals.

More than impressed by peopleprecautions, I was intrigued by the discrepancy in their access to masks. Paying exorbitant prices could secure the robust but scant N95 respirators. Most had the less expensive surgical masks, but even those became hard to find without connections to a supplier. A few wore the dubious varieties like the sponge mask, the washable cartoon cloth mask (I wore a Hello Kitty one to my elementary school during the 2002 SARS epidemic) and even DIY ones like a fashionable shawl.

Flights also became a microcosm of the disparity in protection: first-class cabin passengers were seated at a supposedly safe distance from one another, while the elbow-to-elbow economy travelers fretted the risk of flying amid an outbreak would outweigh the benefit of returning to what they perceived as a safer country.

Even getting a seat on the plane was a privilege. While airlines were suffering overall due to travel bans, demand could surge temporarily around major policy shifts. Following the WHOdeclaration that COVID-19 was a global pandemic, schools around the world moved classes online and shut dorms, prompting international students to go home. Flight tickets skyrocketed. Those who wanted to go home but couldn&t afford the price were stranded.

Week 7: Battling uncertainties

While our plane was traveling across the globe, my home city of Shenzhen announced expanded compulsory quarantine for arrivals from four to eight countries — adding the U.S. to the list — in an effort to contain imported cases as the epicenter of COVID-19 shifted overseas.

At 8 PM, the Shenzhen customs checkpoint resembled a hospital waiting room with a barely moving queue a few hundred meters long. Screenings were underway to detect coronavirus cases. The updated policy had not been officially announced, and many travelers were still expecting their family on the other side of the border. Impatience and confusion filled a hall that was lit by nauseating fluorescent lights. Will everyone be tested for the virus at the border or later at a quarantine base? Will foreigners receive the test for free? Will people have to pay for the quarantine?

Even the immigration staffers had few details. Chinacontainment measures were in flux just like the spread of the virus. The flood of inbound returnees was quickly squeezing the countrymedical resources and filling budget hotels repurposed as quarantine facilities.

At 1 AM, I was finally called upon for a temperature check. I filled out a dozen forms asking similar questions about my travel history and health condition, each going to a different government agency. I wondered why, with Chinaalleged technological prowess, this grunt work hadn&t been digitized or streamlined. Are resources for public monitoring going into other areas the government prioritizes?

I felt exhausted, but not more than the customs officer examining me, who had been toiling away for more than 12 hours. Despite having full-body protection, he was unaware his mask had slid beneath his nose.

&When do you get to go home?& I asked. &Who knows? There are so many of you coming back. China can&t afford another outbreak. We have no choice but to work,& he said nonchalantly.

Once my paperwork was sorted, I proceeded to cross the border. China immediately welcomed me with a text message, reminding me to register with the public security bureau as location data from my telecoms carrier showed I had recently been in &epidemic-stricken& America. The virus outbreak was giving Beijing more reason to monitor individuals. The question was why, given the government already commanded abundant citizen data, it seemed to have struggled in their early efforts to track people traveling from Wuhan.

I was placed in a group of 20 travelers, most of whom were overseas Chinese students, to wait for the shuttle that would take us to the quarantine hotel. We bonded quickly by grumbling about the surreal eight-hour border crossing, but no one was actually angry. Instead, there was an outpouring of genuine gratitude for front-line health and immigration workers.

Famished, one of us volunteered to put everyone in a WeChat group so we could order food delivery together. The WeChat group, aptly named &3.14 Quarantine&, turned out to be useful for trading information and supporting each other through the erratic quarantine period. A street-sweeping truck was humming at a distance. The clock struck 4 AM as our bus pulled up in front of the hotel.

Week 8: Embracing chaos

Adjusting to the Chinese time zone became virtually impossible as my day confined to the hotel room was punctuated by a string of sporadic events: temperature checks, meal deliveries, nucleic acid tests, phone calls from various government agencies and transfers to new quarantine locations. One night, we were given half an hour to pack up and get on a bus that took us to the edge of Shenzhen. There we underwent a virus-detecting test, only to be transported back eight hours later, at 3 a.m., to another hotel in the same area we had previously stayed.

My quarantine peers were growing impatient with the unpredictable circumstances and began calling any relevant phone number they could find. As we shared in our WeChat group snippets of information we had collected from hotel staff, local officials, relatives and friends, something became clear: The quarantine system was the result of mass mobilization and complex coordination between public and private organizations, ranging from health workers and the Communist Partybase-level administrative organ (called neighborhood committees) through to government-subsidized hotels and residential complexes.

When policymakers imposed frequent changes, the players implementing them on the ground often ended up scrambling, leading to miscommunication and such counterproductive measures as shuffling us around in crowded buses. They were briefed only on their part of the job rather thanthe entire process, which remained opaque, so getting close to policymaking power was critical. Calling a relative who worked in the disease control department was probably more useful than asking a hotel staffer. Personal ties seemed to matter even more in China when one sought control in times of uncertainty.

Some of us with insider information learned how to game the system. Before being dispatched to quarantine bases, we had to self-report our household address, for each district government was in charge of quarantining its own returning residents. The more deep-pocketed district normally provided higher-standard lodging and food, a piece of information precious to desperate individuals fighting for marginally better treatment.

I fall into the camp of people embracing chaos, as trying to stay informed and in control over continually updated guidance from above could quickly make me cross the line into anxiety.

There is already an abundance of self-care tips floating around, but having outrun the coronavirus twice, I could at least attest to their efficacy: Pare down your information sources to one or two trustworthy outlets; stay physically active; call people; keep a sense of humor; take deep breaths and perhaps spare some time for a mindfulness talk. Itbetter to reserve grit for any long-term changes caused by COVID-19, which are looking increasingly likely.

On the afternoon of March 29, staff from my neighborhood committee came knocking on my door. Clad in blue hazmat suits, they gave me a final temperature check and granted me a piece of paper declaring my completion of the quarantine. I immediately put on a mask and went downstairs.

Things seemed intact at first glance, but a closer look revealed subtle but long-lasting changes since I had left two months prior.

Everyone was wearing a mask — even drivers alone in their cars. Premises had temperature checks and sanitizers at the entrances. Many small restaurants looked deserted; the ones back in business had more food deliverymen waiting about than people dining in. War-like propaganda posters dotted the street, reminding people that the battle against the plague wasn&t over. The world would never be quite the same.

Quibi, the short-form, mobile-focused video service that Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg first hinted at in 2017, officiallylaunched on Monday.

After years of star-studded content announcements, not to mention $1.75 billion in funding, it might have been impossible for Quibi to live up to expectations. And indeed, it divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast.

None of us was totally won over, but Anthony and Jordan saw something to admire in Quibi ambition, and thought there was promise for the initial lineup of shows — particularly the reality programs like &ChrissyCourt& and &Punk&d,& which actually seem to benefit from the constraints of the short episode format.

There are some interesting scripted titles too, but even the shows we liked — particularly the Liam Hemsworth thriller &Most Dangerous Game& — felt like they&d be better on a bigger screen, with a more traditional running time.

Darrell, meanwhile, enjoyed some of the content, but he was more convinced that the whole enterprise is a massive folly. In his view, the only way to make Quibi work is to take a looser approach to length and to bring the app to other devices.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcastsor find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

And if you&d like to skip ahead, herehow the episode breaks down: 0:00 Intro 0:27 &Star Trek: Picard& listener response 6:04 Quibi first impressions

The Walt Disney Company just announced that its streaming service Disney+ has more than 50 million subscribers.

The service launched less than five months ago, and apparently had 28.6 million subscribers as of February 3.

These &paid subscriber& numbers include subscribers who are bringing in revenue for Disney but are not paying for the service themselves. (TechCrunchparent company Verizon is offering a year of free Disney+ to some customers.) It also includes 8 million subscribers in India, where Disney+ launched last week as part of Hotstar, a popular streaming service that Disney owns thanks to the acquisition of Fox.

While Disney has been relatively slow to release scripted streaming originalsafter the initial splash of &The Mandalorian,& it has been bringing its films like &Frozen 2,& &Onward& and the upcoming &Artemis Fowl& to the service at an accelerated pace, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting theatrical closures.

The service has also been expanding internationally, launching in eight Western European countries — the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria and Switzerland — in the past two weeks.

&We&re truly humbled that Disney+ is resonating with millions around the globe, and believe this bodes well for our continued expansion throughout Western Europe and into Japan and all of Latin America later this year,& said Kevin Mayer, the chairman of Disneydirect-to-consumer and international business, in a statement.

In its latest earnings report, Netflix (which is far more global than Disney+ right now) said it has 167 million paid memberships worldwide.

The U.K. government, like a number of other countries around the world such as the U.S., has stepped up its pace in providing relief in the form of loans for businesses being impacted by the coronavirus health crisis and the related shutdown that we&ve seen across the economy and life as we knew it. But startups in the U.K. are increasingly getting worried that they are being left behind.

An open letter to the Chancellor published today and signed by the U.K.biggest &scale-ups& — later-stage, highly valued, but still venture-backed (and often loss-making) startups such as Deliveroo, Benevolent AI, Citymapper, Graphcore and Bulb — urged the U.K. government to make room to provide lending options to companies like theirs.

They are specifically calling for a special task force to be created to consider how to build lending schemes for companies like theirs, as well as to alter the rules on the three big schemes that have already been announced to accommodate them, and give them the same access as other businesses.

The letter, which we&re publishing in full below, is not the first cry for help. Earlier this week, another initiative called SOS (Save Our Startups), also published an open letter asking for access to the same lending schemes that other businesses are getting. SOS includes dozens of smaller startups and a number of the VCs that back them.

The crux of the matter has been that startups backed with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from VCs to scale their growth have not been built or planned with profitability as a short-term or even medium-term goal. Many of them have so far eschewed public listings (and subsequent credit ratings, for starters) for longer in part because of the large amount of money available to them these days through the private markets — venture capital, family offices, private equity and so on — to grow.

All of that is predicated, however, on the continued health of the wider economy and consumer demand that helped nurture their businesses in the first place. The current public health crisis has thrown that model into disarray, and has meant that the growth these companies had expected will simply not be coming in the form that they expected, if it comes at all. VCs might pick up some of the slack — the biggest of these are still raising, and have in their hands already, huge funds and will step up to support their most promising portfolio companies. But we don&t know how long the effects of the coronavirus will linger, and most likely these startups, like other businesses, will need more.

Countries like France and Germany have accounted for this business disparity. They have created special provisions for lending to startups in response to the COVID-19 economic and social upheaval, and respectively there have been programs backed with $4.3 billion and $2.2 billion in government money put into place. But the three main U.K. initiatives that have been announced — Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme, theCovid Corporate Financing Facility and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme— have basic requirements that effectively rule out scaled-up startups from applying.

These include provisions around having established credit ratings for public companies (as in the case of the bigger loan schemes), or financing that is too small (as in the case of the smaller loan schemes), or the scaled-up companies have annual revenues that are too high (both the CBILS and CLBILS schemes have respective turnover thresholds of £45 million and £500 million).

In the meantime, the U.K. government has made small moves to encourage startups to continue building in a more focused way — for example, last week it announced £50 million in grants to businesses that are building better &resiliency& products to help companies better weather crises like this in the future. But for companies that regularly see revenues (and corresponding expenses and losses) in the tens and hundreds of millions, grants in the tens of thousands of dollars are like putting drops of water into the ocean.

But with startups accounting for some 30,000 businesses and some 300,000 workers in the U.K., and significant sums toward the countryGDP and operations, it seems like a big problem to ignore for too long.

[letter follows below]

Dear Chancellor,

We greatly appreciate the significant steps that you have taken to help British businesses through the COVID-19 crisis. But as founders and CEOs of leading UK companies we are concerned that unless urgent changes are made to the current schemes then the high-growth UK tech sector will be put at risk.

As innovative companies we build technology and systems that transform sectors. For customers, we drive costs down, standards up and for society we create whole new categories of products and services. We are vital to productivity, clean growth and UK exports.

But unfortunately, the COVID-19 lending schemes you have put in place benefit established firms and do not help companies of the future such as ours.

The businesses we run serve millions of customers across the UK, and overseas. We are stepping up to help the country at this difficult time by helping tens of thousands of small businesses to continue operating, helping vulnerable customers get essential services and using innovative technology to give the NHS better tools to tackle the pandemic.

The high-growth tech sector has introduced innovative new products that have improved the lives of millions of customers in the UK and many more around the world. We have created huge numbers of high skilled jobs and we export across the globe.

Our sector will be crucial to helping the UK economy bounce back quickly after the pandemic. The UK tech community is a world class engine for innovation and growth, however, it has not yet received Government support, unlike our competitors in France and Germany.

Our companies have all invested in technology and growth rather than short term profitability, which means that we are currently unable to access the schemes which have been designed with longer-established businesses in mind. The current schemes that you have put in place & the Covid Corporate Financing Facility (CCFF), the Coronavirus Large Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CLBILS) and the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) & are not accessible to our businesses.

We are therefore writing to ask you to urgently set up a taskforce meeting of leading tech businesses to work with you and your officials to find a way for high-growth tech companies to be able to access the lending schemes you have already established or new schemes if necessary.

As you said in your Budget speech earlier this year, to help Britainbusinesses lead the next generation of high productivity industries, we need to invest in the technologies of the future. The high-growth tech sector has a vital role to play in the future success of the UK economy, and we urge you to work with us to ensure that it is helped through the crisis and that the UK is still the best place in the world to build a tech company.

Confirmed Signatories

Ali Parsa, Babylon

Joanna Shields, BenevolentAI

Peter Smith, Blockchain

Hayden Wood, Bulb

Azmat Yusuf, Citymapper

Poppy Gustafsson, Darktrace

Will Shu, Deliveroo

Marc Warner, Faculty

Stan Boland, Five AI

Hiroki Takeuchi, GoCardless

Nigel Toon, Graphcore

Herman Narula, Improbable

The aerospace market is evolving quickly and merging with other segments of tech, making it an exciting space for both startups and investors — but the complications of the global pandemic are being felt by both.

Bessemer Venture Partners investor Tess Hatch has been helping guide companies in their portfolio through these strange times, and has been rolling with the punches herself.

Hatch recently spoke to us about the advice shebeen offering startups, which companies are being hit hardest and where opportunity still lies in the frontier tech world. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Austerity measures and hard-hit hardware

TechCrunch: I&m interested in how the virus is affecting things in the investment world. Have you made any official accommodations, like a change of strategy, or putting off key investments, things like that?

Tess Hatch: Of course, we&re advising startups on things to do, like their employee safety, and implementing working from home, and tools and tips and tricks that can help that. Especially when it comes to hardware companies — itkind of hard to work from home when you&re manufacturing.

We&re advising them to really watch their burn, because their top line is not going to hit where they expected it to hit, like a double or triple revenue, it&ll maybe stay the same. If it increases even a little bit, they&re winning. We&re having these individual company-to-company conversations, just advising them on getting through, hopefully just these next couple of quarters, but it could be next year plus.

There is the question of new deals that we were looking at and this is a time where entrepreneurs will find amazing opportunities to solve the most pressing/immediate societal challenges and we are here to invest in them. We&re still taking new pitch meetings, new deals, we&re still busy, just doing it in the comfort of our pajamas rather than at the office.

So would you say that it has affected the frequency or the cadence of your investments, on a larger scale?

Therereally been like three partnership meetings since craziness happened. And the number of deals that we&ve talked about in the presentations we&ve had, those have remained the same, but ask that question in three more weeks, and I&m sure it I&ll have a better answer.

One of the funny things we&re talking about is that investors, one of their favorite things is to be able to predict how the future, at least the next year or two, is going to go. But this is one of the greatest times of uncertainty we&ve all lived through. So how are you approaching that when thereso much thatuncertain, but thereso much that you need to know in order to effectively manage your portfolio, give advice and make sound investments?

Right now, it is shaking everything that we&ve believed in so strongly. However, we still are looking out, letsay two to five-plus years. The real question is if this is going to be, with quarantining and lowering the curve, a little bit more under control by letsay the summertime, or if this is going to be more than a couple of quarters, say a couple of years.

One of the many things we are advising is for our companies that are able, raise a bit of extra capital now while the water is shut off, but therestill a little bit trickling from the showerhead… I have not seen anything like this in my short career, but there are partners at the firm who have been here 20-plus years and while they have never seen this particular situation, I&ve been amazed by their ability to deal with these unique challenges and advise our companies on how to get through this. Itlike you said, the uncertainty of just not knowing how long or how drastically this is affecting everything.

I think that the hardware companies that you mentioned, those may have it the hardest because they involve so much travel, so much mailing back and forth of prototypes for testing. Is there any specific advice that you have for hardware companies that are trying to build a product right now?

Unfortunately, most of them have stopped all travel. We&re trying to do as much as we can virtually. The majority of them are smaller teams that are actually making, letsay, a drone, or an autonomous robot, and they&re just staying six feet apart and taking all of the necessary precautions, doing every-other shifts. So if, say ita six-person team, three of them are working in the morning and three of them are working in the afternoon to increase the distance between all of them. The offices — especially where we&re building drones — are huge, so theretons of space for everyone.

The real issue though, is our customers aren&t showing up to work, you know? One of our companies, Impossible Aerospace, sells drones to police and fire departments. This is one of the best times to use drones to deliver emergency medical supplies, or even toilet paper and hand sanitizer to people in need. The ones that do have the drones are happy and they&re using them, but the ones that don&t, they&re so overwhelmed with everything else thatgoing on.

There are always leads to follow up on, contracts to hammer out and negotiate, improvements you can make to your sales process. Is this something that there actually is a lot of, that even hardware companies can focus on in these downtimes?

At a high level, I&m sure there are people in the organization that can turn and do that. But think about a sales person or business development, there are certain ones that, their entire job is shaking hands or going to these events. I mean, think of marketing spend with no conferences this year, and all that upsets.

Aerospace between air and space

You wrote an article last week for us about a sort of neglected area of the new space industry, the stratosphere. I feel like people have been chasing this for a long time, but that the drawbacks of being in atmosphere are too much, especially when LEO [low Earth orbit] is getting so cheap. Do you really think that things like balloons and blimps are in the cards?

I agree with you that LEO is definitely becoming more accessible and cheaper and this market is shifting from price per kilogram to time to orbit, with launch vehicles like Rocket Labcoming to fruition.

However, there are still so many things one needs to do to modify their sensor for LEO. And with LEO, you&re only over the same area of interest for letsay 15 minutes of a 90-minute orbit. And even then, the revisit rate over the same spot of Earth, it depends on the orbit, but itdaily, weekly, sometimes more than weekly. The only way to stay over a single point in space is GEO [geosynchronous orbit], and that36,000 kilometers versus 500 to 1,200 [for LEO].

All major indices rose Wednesday, led by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, which increased 3.44% to close above 23,000 for the first time since March 13.

Investors seemed heartened by comments made by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, who said Wednesday that the U.S. death count from COVID-19 is lower than initially modeled. He warned that the death count will continue to climb even as new cases slow.

The action Wednesday followed rallies earlier this week. Still, it should be noted that the Dow Jones Industrial Average still closed below yesterdayhigh of 23,537.44, suggesting that this could be a bear market run.

Herethe breakdown at closing:

• Dow Jones rose 3.44%, or 779.71 points, to close at 23,433.57
• S-P 500 increased 3.41%, or 90.57, to close at 2,749.98
• Nasdaq popped 2.58%, or 203.64 points, to close at 8,090.90

Equities were also buoyed by oil prices and news that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, whose policies fueled concerns about higher taxes, was dropping out of the race.

Transportation saw a bump today. Uber rose 4.66% to close at $26.94. Thatstill more than 34.7% below this yearhigh of $41.27, reached in February. Meanwhile, Lyft also saw shares rise 7.78% to close at $29.64. Again, itthe same story as Uber. Lyftshare price is still off — about 45% — from the year-to-date highs. (Uber and Lyft have seesawed this year, first on profit promises, later on cash concerns, and more. Itbeen an active year so far for ride-hailing companies.)

Among todayleaders were airlines, which have been one of the harder hit industries in this COVID-19 era. United led the pack with a 12.38% bump to close at $27.51, followed by American Airlines and Delta, which rose 109.% and 4.4% respectively. Tesla had a volatile day that ended nearly where it began, with a 0.62% increase to close at $548.84.

Automakers also saw shares rise. GM shares rose 8.59% to close at $23.13, while Ford increased 6.59% to $5.03 and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles closed up 3.15% to $7.86 a share.

Finally today, the rally touched on a key group of stocks that we track carefully here at TechCrunch, namely SaaS stocks — the equities associated with modern software companies and cloud-focused firms. The index that we track monitoring the group of companies, the Bessemer cloud index, shot 5.8% higher today, a huge rally. The index is still off from its recent highs, but has recovered along with the broader stock market. If its gains will help startups that are SaaS-based raise more easily is not yet clear, but the indexgains are good news for founders and investors in private software companies.