Former Cisco CEO turned venture capitalist John Chambers sounded a stark warning to business leaders at HPE Discover.

“First, 40% to 50% of the Fortune 500 will not exist in a decade,” he said, joining HPE CEO Antonio Neri in a pre-recorded video for the Discover keynote. “It’s going to be a brutal change. And these terrible events we’re now seeing will actually accelerate that. Probably 60% of the startups won’t exist in a decade and a number of them won’t exist in two to three years. So, it’s a period of time where you either disrupt or you get disrupted.”

However, he also shared his playbook on how business leaders can survive the current pandemic and be one of the disruptive companies still standing in 10 years.

After retiring from Cisco, where he oversaw 180 acquisitions, Chambers with his son, also named John Chambers, founded a venture capital firm called JC2 Ventures. The senior Chambers serves as CEO. He’s seen six financial crises, five health-care crises, although the COVID-19 pandemic is “obviously the most severe,” he told Neri, and three supply-chain crises. “So I’ve seen the movie a number of times, and the playbook, both on what you do and learning from my mistakes of the past, is remarkably repeatable.”

The first thing, Chambers said: “as a leader, you don’t hide. You need to be very transparent out in front.”

Second, be realistic about how much is crisis-induced — in this case, how much of the business disruption did the pandemic actually cause — and how much was the company’s own fault because it needed to change. “You must address both at the same time,” Chambers said.

Third: address “platforms” or key focus areas. Chambers said he likes odd numbers, so he suggests focusing on five or seven topics including controlling expenses, free cash flow, employees, customers, and partners.

“These platforms are going to lead you through the crisis and prepare you for the outcome you anticipate,” he said. Determine what you want the company to look like in 12-18 months, and then paint that picture for employees, partners, and shareholders. “And then you regularly communicate back on how you’re moving toward those objectives … You also want to say what are my new, big bets” on how the company will survive the crisis.

Plus, he added crises always last longer than anticipated. “And they will usually be deeper. So try to make your changes one time, and prepare yourself for the future.”

There’s opportunity in crisis, and a chance to “really position the company and your employees to not only survive, but to lead in the next generation of great companies,” Chambers said.

To be one of these leaders, companies must become “digital natives,” and Neri pointed to Pensando Systems, a company formed by former Cisco execs and backed by both HPE and JC2 Ventures as an example. Chambers also serves as chairman of the Pensando board of directors.

Pensando, which developed a distributed computing platform for the edge, launched last October with $278 million funding, a customer (Goldman Sachs, also an investor) in production, upwards of 10 other major organizations including Equinix and two cloud providers in trials, “and a whole slew of enterprise customers from our partnership with HPE,” CEO Prem Jain said at the time.

It’s led by Silicon Valley legends Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero, and Soni Jiandani — known collectively as “MPLS” — who have worked together for more than 25 years and left Cisco to start Pensando, where they started building a building a custom processor and SDN platform for the edge almost four years ago.

“This is a team that has built eight, billion-dollar products, usually 50% to 70% market share,” Chambers said today about the Pensando leadership team. “And it’s a company that combines basically the ability to do storage and security and compute at the edge, and I think we both envision that’s where probably 75% of the data and applications will occur.”