One of the things that Bill Gates mentions in his recent TED talk about the coronavirus is that we need to be aware of what might be coming in developing countries, particularly in the southern hemisphere with winter about to arrive. (There's some evidence of a relationship with temperature.)

So far, countries like Brazil have been criticized for taking a laid-back approach to fighting the coronavirus. But the same could be said for many, or perhaps most, countries around the world at the outset.

However, in the case of densely populated slums -- like Brazil’s favelas -- the problem is expected to be more severe. Without the ability to socially isolate and without proper services, it is questionable whether they will be able to "flatten the curve" in the same way that some developed countries have. There's also a lack of government oversight in these communities.

Incidentally, the Financial Times is reporting that organized crime has started to step in to fill this void -- and it is happening over WhatsApp. Here is an excerpt from the above article: “Whoever is caught on the street will learn how to respect the measure. We want the best for the population. If the government is unable to manage, organised crime resolves,” read one message sent to residents of a Rio de Janeiro slum.

One hope is that rich countries will be largely through their outbreaks by the summer and that a vaccine will be well on its way.

(On a related note, here is an excellent slide deck from the London Business School on the economics of this pandemic. It's very comprehensive and worth a read.)

I have to tell you all about a company that I just discovered called Premise. I think it’s incredible what they’re doing and a perfect example of mobile (smartphones) eating the world.

The problem that Premise is solving is that of developing-world economic data being both not timely enough and not all that accurate/granular. This is important, because lots of big organizations – ranging from governments to private companies – are making funding and investment decisions based on this inadequate information.

So here’s what Premise did:

They put smartphones into the hands of the people who are on the ground in these places. They paid them meaningful amounts of money (relative to local wages). And they developed a technology platform that could index and analyze the millions of local observations being sent in. So far they have paid out over $3 million to their contributors located across 34 countries.

As an example: Premise has developed food price indices. And the data comes directly from locals physically going to the market on a regular basis (which most would do anyways) and snapping photos of the food + prices. This allows Premise to provide basically realtime pricing data. (There are checks and balances to ensure data integrity.)

Why does this matter? 

Because it allows Premise, for instance, to figure out exactly what happens to food staple pricing when something like an Ebola epidemic hits:

“Premise started tracking food prices in Monrovia on September 8, and throughout the month we observed upward pressure on prices (our Liberia indices and data are freely available at data.premise.com). The price of rice, Liberia’s primary food staple, increased 12% during September. Moreover, we saw significant price differences across the city. Prices in neighborhoods with the most exposure to Ebola were 8-12% higher on average than relatively unaffected neighborhoods. As the disease tore through the city, market sellers avoided the worst-hit areas and trade declined.”

This is powerful information and just one example of what Premise is doing. Obviously this data is also of use to for-profit companies, which is how the company has managed to raise over $66 million in VC funding. But I think there will also be big benefits for these developing countries. As the saying goes, you make what you measure.

I just finished reading Peter Thiel’s new book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. For those of you who may not be well-versed in the world of technology geeks, Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He was one of the founders of PayPal back in 1998 and was the first outside investor in Facebook in 2004. He invested $500,000 for a 10.2% stake in the company!

While the focus of the book is obviously on technology startups, it’s less about “here’s how you build a startup” (there is no formula) and more about “here’s how to think about the world, humanity, and the future of our civilization.” So even if you’re not a founder, or startup and technology enthusiast, I think you’d still find it really interesting.

As one example, Thiel makes the distinction early on in the book between what he calls “vertical or intensive progress” and “horizontal or extensive progress.” The specific example he gives is of typewriters and word processors. If you take one typewriter and figure out how to make 100 of them, you’ve made horizontal progress. However, if you’ve just replaced typewriters with word processors, you’ve made vertical progress.

In other words, vertical progress is doing new things and horizontal progress is just copying things that we know already work. In the grand scheme of the world, he argues that globalization is really just a form of horizontal progress. The rise of China is a result of them copying what has already worked in developed countries. But the true way to advance our economy and civilization is to not just copy – that’s easy – it’s to do, new, things.

That, of course, is a lot harder to do. But to build the future, you need to build things and do things that haven’t been done before.

Which is why Thiel actually gives $100,000 to a handful of college students every year so that they can drop-out and pursue a startup. In his mind, our education system is just perpetuating the status quo. MBAs move money around without creating anything new. Lawyers just preserve value and mitigate risk, also without creating anything new (Thiel is trained as a lawyer). And so he doesn’t believe that is the best way forward.

This may not sit right with many of you, but questioning the status quo is a prerequisite if you’re trying to do new things.