Ben Gilbert: recommendation

Transcript context

…My question is, what do entrepreneurs and investors do? If you agree that the dynamism part of the American economy needs to be reinvigorated, let's take Ohio. Are new steel startups going to get started in Ohio? What's the right way to approach this? Is it legacy companies? Is it a combination of both? I think it's all of the above. Governors all over this country want their states to be more dynamic and want their economies to be stronger. They want to attract more people generally. In Ohio, I always think the way to approach it is to leverage the existing assets that you have. Most people don't know this, but Columbus, Ohio, in particular, is starting to develop a pretty nice tech scene. There's a company called Drive Capital which was started by Mark Kvamme, who some of you all might know. His fund is doing incredibly well. They've had a handful of IPOs in the last few years and some solid acquisitions. As a result, you're seeing this burgeoning tech scene more on the software side in Columbus, Ohio. A lot of it is in the insurance space. We happen to have an incredible insurance industry in Ohio as well. It turns out, nationwide people know a lot about how to create new insurance products. Exactly. You have this sort of nice little flywheel building around software, insurance, and technology. Then the capital and expertise is there with Drive Capital. Layer the Intel investment on top of that, and we'll have some giant fabs and investment happening right outside of Columbus. It's a trite term, but you can see sort of a Silicon Heartland sort of dynamic taking place. What we'll need to do is find a way to become great at advanced manufacturing, chip manufacturing, and all those sorts of things. We're going to actually have to build the facilities and the support services around them. That's going to happen in Ohio, and that's really exciting. That's just the Columbus area. Northeast Ohio, Ben, as you know, the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospital are two of the most innovative medical facilities in the world. I think we need to do a much better job as a region connecting the innovations that are happening inside the walls of those two great institutions out to the broader ecosystem. I think if you sort of look at the pockets throughout states and see, okay, what assets do I already have, how can I leverage them, and what's fast growing, high growing, I think you can start to piece together a strategy. Take a step up to a national level. I think you need to have the incentives put in place, such that as we transition away from fossil fuels and towards more clean energy, we're doing as much of that development and manufacturing here as possible, that we're mining the minerals here, and that we're building sustainable supply chains around that. That could be anywhere. That's sort of how I think about the economic challenges that we have.…

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