🦠 Eric Schmidt on how we get out of this

My chat with Google's former boss

“How long will this last?” is a question I’ve been asked by many of the founders, investors and senior execs with whom I’ve dealt in the last two weeks.

This week, I put this question to Eric Schmidt, who was CEO and then Chairman of Google for 16 years. Schmidt has had tremendous global business experience, seeing Google through the aftermath of 9/11, its IPO and then dealing with the recession caused by the Global Financial Crisis. He has navigated shocks many times before.

He is now an active investor, philanthropist and generally well-networked character.

I want to briefly share his answer to the question I asked him about how we get out of this a locked-down population and frozen economy.

Eric had made the point that he would expect “a very slow recovery” in the US in the following order:

First, office and business manufacturing will return and it will return with people who are certified are reasonably confident to not be infectious. The next thing that will happen is that there wil…