February 1, 2021

Over a year ago—when only a few people in China had died from a mysterious virus—we updated our investors on the threat of what would become the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Regarding the potential spread of COVID-19 (and consequential global economic fallout), we did the math, and were frightened. This was in January.

At the time, we didn’t know what “RT-PCR” meant; we even capitalized the ‘c’ in “Coronavirus”, and referred to it as “the Coronavirus”. Shows how little we knew.

We were frantically trying to learn as much as we could, and were translating news in Mandarin, calling doctors we knew to ask how bad this could get (which, incidentally, every doctor with whom we spoke told us the virus isn’t a big deal), and deeply researched the SARS outbreak of 2002-2003. It is our business to try to understand, prepare for, and invest in the future. We tried to prepare and hedge as strategically as we could.

We had to think in a mindset where millions of people in the U.S. and around the world were infected, even though only a few people in China had died from the virus at the time. When nearly the entire world is locked in their homes, hundreds of thousands of people are dying from the virus, businesses of all sizes are already bankrupt, and no end is in sight, it is hard to think of investment opportunities. That’s how we had to think, though. In January 2020. It is worth noting that we are long-only, so we didn’t even consider shorting any stocks; we weren’t thinking in that mindset—we were only looking for opportunities.

The first opportunity we found was in genome sequencing. BGI was a company we knew well, and the word across the pond was that BGI was working faster and better than any other company to try to help scientists better understand the SARS-CoV-2 strain (the strain that causes COVID-19)—BGI sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 genome in just 10 days (SARS-CoV-1 sequencing took 195 days in 2002).

This is a letter we sent to our investors over a year ago.

We then identified more investment opportunities if/when the virus spread globally: telemedicine, e-learning, masks/PPE, were the focus. We made our own COVID-19 dashboards and scraped the few data we could find by hand, long before there were online COVID-19 dashboards.

When it became a global pandemic, we were not surprised—we were prepared.