What does it mean for large electronic / tech companies to mostly not travel for months, maybe up to a year? International travel on pause for sure for a while, and locally (like NYS), requires isolation of 14 days when arriving.
Giant sponsorships of significant events, flying around for meetings, sponsoring things like sporting events are all paused or very different.
And what does it mean when a company’s business model relies (or relied upon) on in-person workshops, travel in the USA / international, or schools being open, in-person, for workshops? There is a lot of work to re-build. We will all need to do things differently.
We built Adafruit not to travel or need to get in a plane to succeed, despite everyone telling us in-person workshops was the only way to grow. We made Adafruit not need a retail store, despite everyone telling us to do so. There were many reasons we did all this, but the things we built are more interesting now.
Our learning system has over 2,000+ guides. We’ve been doing a weekly video “Show and Tell” and “Ask an Engineer” for about ten years. Our Discord has over 22k people. For ten years, when a conference organizer wanted Limor to speak, we could often convince them to do a live video factory tour/talk, and we’ll continue to do that. We expanded “Show and Tell” to one full hour, and we now have multiple shows per week (MakeCode, 3D hangouts, JP’s workshop, show and tells for each, and a deep dive with Scott). We publish every day on the blog, open-source code, open-source hardware. At this time, Adafruit is the #1 certified open-source hardware company. These are all forms of daily publishing in some way.
In NYC, we have on-site in USA manufacturing where we make our products, and we also have factory partners around the world, and the USA, when needed to meet demand or when supply chain issues come up. We are shipping thousands of packages a day again, and this month we’ll be shipping ADABOX.
We’ve not done layoffs, cut hours or pay, no furloughs, all contractors are all working and paid.
There is so much to do every day to keep this all going, it’s possible, it’s incredibly challenging. If you’re in the electronic biz, you’re going to need to be others focused more than every, maybe even for the first time.
Collectively, we can supply what the world needs, it will not be easy, from educational electronics for remote learning to high-tech sensors, we all must keep it together and keep going.
At this time 7/12/2020 – These are the only places USA Citizens can use sorta their passport to go to, and many of destinations require a COVID-19 test *and* 14 day isolation. Most of the destinations are Caribbean islands.
- Albania
- Antigua and Barbuda
- Aruba
The Bahamas- Barbados
- Belize
- Bermuda
- Croatia
- Dominican Republic
- Ecuador
- French Polynesia
- Ireland
- Jamaica
- Kosovo
- Lebanon
- Maldives
- Mexico
- North Macedonia
- St. Lucia
- St. Maarten
- St. Vincent & Grenadines
- Serbia
- Tanzania
- Turkey
- Turks and Caicos
- Ukraine
- UAE
- UK
- South Korea
Update: 7/20/2020 … The Bahamas is now off-limits to USA Citizens.
Where Can U.S. Citizens Travel to During the Coronavirus Pandemic? – The New York Times, American Passports Are Worthless Now (Map) by Indi Samarajiva – Medium, & U.S. State Department Global Level 4 Health Advisory.
And there’s more, for New York state as of 6/23/2020, if you travel to/from the following states, or have visitors from the following states, 14 day quarantine when arriving in New York.
- Alabama
- Arkansas
- Arizona
- California
- Delaware
- Florida
- Georgia
- Iowa
- Idaho
- Kansas
- Louisiana
- Mississippi
- North Carolina
- Nevada
- Oklahoma
- South Carolina
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
As a nation, we are about six months into the pandemic, and things are not getting better, they are getting worse for most of the USA. In NYC, we lived through the worst, first. Others did not learn the lessons in the rest of our nation. Unending sirens, makeshift morgues, climbing daily death counts. Everyone at Adafruit lost someone or something. We avoided anyone getting infected and operated safely as an essential business to help our city. Now we’re seeing a repeat of what happened to us start to occur around the USA.
Electronic companies, there’s a path through this, we’ll all need to be sturdy and make tough decisions on what to make, focus on, who to partner with, what to spend on, and what to do.