Startup Street: COVID-19 is a grey swan event, says Aditya Ghosh

It was about a month’s back that venture capital firm Sequoia called the coronavirus outbreak the black swan event of 2020. A black swan is an unpredictable or unforeseen event that is beyond what is normally expected of a situation and has potentially severe consequences.

Aditya Ghosh, Board Member at OYO also believes that at best we can call it a grey swan event. He said, “A lot of people have been talking of COVID as a black swan event and like you said my disagreement is that the very first definition of it is that was it completely outside the realm of possibility. Was it something that we could have just not imagined? On one hand, while we could have not predicted the exact nature of the crisis and that is why I call it as a grey swan instead of a white and black swan, but I do believe that all of us could have been better prepared for a fallout of some crisis of a global nature.”

Talking about the future of travel and hospitality he said, “It is definitely the darkest hour in the sense that the travel and hospitality business is one of the first that got hit and it is going through the massive immediate shock. I believe that this is a somewhat artificial shock because of the lockdown and because of the travel restrictions that are out there. The moment that gets eased or is lifted you will again see a sudden surge in demand. My confidence comes from the fact because this is this artificial intervention the underlying fundamentals of the market have not changed, there is still going to be the need to travel.”