At first, it seemed something unthinkable, but eventually, each day it impacted us more. To such an extent, that most of us in every corner of the world are locked up at home. This invisible “enemy” whom we have named Covid-19 seems to have jeopardized humanity. From Angela Merkel to the deadliest of mortals, we are bewildered without knowing very well what to do. Our teams ask us for certainties, but we don’t really have them. It seems that the growth projections, investment rounds, expansion plans, had been suspended in time.

January 2020 begins with a Wall Street record, and a few days later, Medium is awash with posts with survival strategies. It seems our generation needs to eat humble pie. We had been taught that the beauty of life was living connected to the whole world, traveling, learning, experiencing. PAUSE. It seems that, at the end of the day, there is something more important than filling our calendar with fancy restaurants, or exclusive meetings. In just two weeks, the world altered the course of direction from which it was going. In those adventures and luxurious travel destinies, we were all planning to take, our health and the others’ appeared. Conversations shifting from economics, startups, VCs to “rethink everything”.

It seems that slowly there are no more competitors, or at least not those that we study on books. We have to sit down to think about what our responsibility is and what our possibilities are when facing this situation. The universe is forcing us to take a deep look and to be able to act with a logic that isn’t profit maximization.

For the next weeks, grandparents, adults, children, will be inside their homes. How can our companies rise to the occasion and transform? It’s our responsibility to provide them education, food, and even entertainment. But, it’s time to do it in a way, maybe one that we weren’t used to, and probably not the one in our business model.

Some days ago, we were looking for solutions to be better than our “rivals”. I think it’s time to think together. Which are the safest ways to deliver food orders? How can we ensure maximum hygiene standards for the users? If you are an entertainment company, which new type of users will start using your solutions? Are they used to technology? Should you create video tutorials to show them how to use it? How do we deliver medical products to every corner of the planet? Or even, begin to share ideas with others in need… how can we help small businesses to keep marketing their goods?

As a society, we have the opportunity to bond and work together, to unite our creativity, our intelligence, our capabilities. To get faster. Faster than our competitor? Definitely not. Faster than that invisible enemy that won’t let us sleep in peace for the last days. Covid-19 showed us that far from becoming Gods, as individuals we remain as weak as the first homo sapiens was. I think it awakened the opportunity to finally build a Super Society: Humanly weak, socially powerful.

Written by Mariano Saenz