What's your forecast for startup founders during the current corona crisis?

Amy Webb, the latest guest in the Bits & Pretzels Podcast, a quantitative futurist and professor of strategic foresight at the NYU Stern School of Business, expects the weakest startups to probably fail as well as a huge consolidation wave.

Amy is a Founder of the Future Today Institute where she works with the world’s leading Fortune 100 companies – and today exclusively shares her knowledge about the startup ecosystem in conversation with Bits & Pretzels' Britta Weddeling.

We reached the foresight expert in New York, where she collects data, trends and new technologies that will shape the future, and we talked about what entrepreneurs need to do now to prepare for tomorrow. Amy said that during these uncertain times, founders should lean into the uncertainty instead of shying away from it.

She actually believes that now's the best time for entrepreneurs to shape a better future with a new "sort of a grassroots innovation effort" taking place:

Rather than people waiting for the big tech companies to build something cool and bestowed upon society, or for the government to come up with some cool idea and make it work for everybody, I'm seeing people taking it upon themselves to innovate their businesses and their communities.

And like always our podcast guest shares hands-on and immediately applicable advice of what startups need to do to innovate their products and what vital questions they should ask themselves:

If you can't measure it, you can't improve it. So how are you measuring your success? How are you measuring what you're doing? Do those measurements actually make sense? Are they taking into account uncertainty and change? And then what are you doing to improve every single day?

She also thinks that founders should focus more on outside signals than on their own product, because that's just "an excuse to put on blinders", according to her: "You have to be willing to continually monitor signals from the outside world."

Amy is also a bestselling author with “The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream,” where she explains how to forecast emerging technology and her latest "The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity" about Amazon, Alphabet or Alibaba shape the future of mankind.