Summary:

“What problems do you want to solve? What do you love doing? Who do you want to be around?”… This week we’re fortunate enough to sit down with Talent Partner at Drive Capital, Robert Hatta – Robert holds experiences from some of the most successful startups (or at least what once were) in the world. We cover the top things he’s learned throughout his career working for those companies (Apple, Netflix, Virgin Mobile, to name a few), everything him and his team have going on at Drive Capital, and what makes Columbus such a perfect place for the venture capital firm to be located.

Episode Timeline:

00:00 – Intro, Background, and Patreon Plug
02:40 – Drive Capital background
03:45 – Hatta’s path to Drive Capital & the “Cleveland Struggle”
06:00 – School came easy to me, and startups helped me realize that I need to constantly be learning new things
09:30 – Robert dates himself by telling us how “You used to have to go into a physical store if you wanted to buy software…”, yikes…
12:18 – I realized I can learn something really fast, apply it in real-time to a real-business, and really make an impact
15:45 – Get going and ask a ton of questions
17:30 – I got a lot out of every experience, and most of them weren’t successes
17:45 – Virgin Mobile experience
22:30 – Can you find & build elite teams in Columbus, Ohio?
26:00 – How do you develop a level of self awareness necessary to succeed and be happy?
28:30 – Successfully articulating to a company why you want what you want, and convincing them to pay you to do it for them
30:50 – ZoCo Design Advertisement
31:30 – Lessons learned from traveling and living abroad
34:00 – Why the midwest, and why Ohio? Since cloud computing has started to emerge, the necessity to be in Silicon Valley has dissipated
40:15 – How does fund raising work with a Venture Capital firm?
44:15 – We’re not creating a trend, we’re capitalizing on it
45:20 – What make Venture Capital different from other ways to raise funds? Is it for everyone?
47:00 – Drive Captial’s portfolio
50:00 – Root
52:00 – Columbus is the best place in the world to build a venture capital fund, because it’s the best place in the world to build a high performing company
54:00 – What does it mean to you to “Live Uncomfortably?”
56:30 – These are situations that you chose and that you decided to put yourself into. You’ve already made your decision, now you have to suck it up.
58:00 – Closing remarks & shameless plugs from the Conquering Columbus team

Links:

DriveCapital
Robert Hatta LinkedIn
Robert Hatta Twitter
CrossChx
CoverMyMeds
Root
ZoCo Design[subscribe]