 I'm Michael North and welcome to the ThinkTech studios in beautiful downtown Honolulu. I would like to welcome you back to another episode of The Art of Thinking Smart. This series was originally created by David Chang of Wealthbridge and I'm co-hosting the programs for him for some time. The idea behind this series is to transmit some of the accumulated wisdom of some of the leaders of Hawaii about how they have achieved success. What are the roots of their success? What sustains them and what are their ultimate goals? And the idea is thinking smart is much better than just thinking fast or thinking big. Being able to think around a corner instead of barreling through a wall is far better key to success in the long term for those of us who are dedicated to a life of service to our community and through business. And business is the downstroke for our guest today who is Rob Robinson. Rob has followed a twisting path to this studio today beginning in South Africa and going through Harvard and other universities and coming to Hawaii in the early part of this century to work as a professor at the University of Hawaii in the business school there. And he's really one of the founders of the venture capital industry in Hawaii. And with Rob's arrival here, or maybe to some degree because of it, an active venture capital industry has sprung up in Hawaii. Rob, what I want to ask you is the values that drive you today, the standards that you have for what is worthwhile, what is meaningful, how you direct your priorities on a day-to-day basis. They started somewhere way back in South Africa and when you were four years old, something happened with you or your father or your mother or a neighbor or something that you read or saw. Where did the development of your values begin and how? Share with us a little story, a little experience of those roots. Oh, well, thank you, Michael, and it's good to be here. You know, I don't normally get asked to go that far back in my history. Usually people start with, how long have you been in Hawaii? But it is true. I grew up in South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. Not a great time to be in South Africa at the height of apartheid and the world's rejection of that system of government. And I obviously, I'm sure your audience can tell, I'm a white South African. There were many of my countrymen who were not white, who were discriminated against and treated very badly by the apartheid regime and I can't really explain why I developed a sense of injustice about that and many other people did not seem particularly bothered by it. But for me, it seemed very inconsistent that I would be treated one way in my life and other people would be treated another way based purely on the color of their skin. And I think out of that, I developed a sense of conscience and of fairness and justice because I definitely, one of my heart button issues is injustice and seeing people being treated unfairly. And I also developed, I think, what is a healthy skepticism about government and what government tells you because I grew up in a very restricted media environment where there were no private sources of information, at least not free sources of information. And so all we got were state approved propaganda and I had to learn to think critically about what I was hearing and compare the reality of what I was seeing every day with what I was being told. And I think that sort of critical thinking is essential for an academic. I think you're taught to do that. Is this something that you teach in your classes at Scheidler? Well, perhaps it's in the form, the ethics of your classes there? I think the notion of fairness and justice and treating people with respect and not accepting that one automatically has an advantage just because one's locked into a particular situation is a part of my teaching. Obviously I'm at a business school, I'm not at a political science department and I don't teach civics, but I think those values remain with me. Those values have a place in business discourse and they form a style, I think, and I think a lot of the most successful companies are those that practice diversity and promote the people based on merit rather than based on external features and cultural judgments and so on. And I find it interesting that you started in a place which was probably one of the least tolerant and diverse societies of the 20th century and here you are now in Hawaii which is probably the most tolerant and most diverse of all the 50 states in the United States. Do you think there's some kind of center of gravity that drew you ever westward to this place? That's interesting, and yet Hawaii is strangely familiar to me. The first time I got off an airplane in Honolulu and I looked around, Hawaii is almost exactly on the opposite side of the globe to South Africa and the East, West and North South Right. If you took a knitting needle and you put it through a globe with Hawaii and through the center of the earth it comes out very close to South Africa. And so the climate is very similar. I grew up in a place called Durban which is on the east coast of South Africa which is a warm water surfing paradise and a lot of the flora and fauna is the same. The flora and the fauna, we have the mongoose you have, we have here unfortunately all invasive species, the boofoo frog, the toad, the mongoose, the minor birds, giant snails. Those were all in my backyard when I was a kid growing up in South Africa. But in terms of the diversity, Durban was a very diverse environment. We had a lot of people of Indian origin. It's actually with Gandhi, God his start, which a lot of people don't know. And so the diversity of Hawaii actually reminds me of that environment. But it's a more benign version of the place I grew up. Interesting. So the values that you had in those days have translated into a series of practices, day-to-day habits that you have. And when you get up in the morning, I'm sure you have, as we all do, you have a ritual that you go through and you have a way of sort of envisioning your day and going forward to it. Can you share with us a little bit about the discipline that you use to organize your thinking and your day and your priorities to set yourself? Something practical that people who are watching this can say, this is a pretty interesting, successful guy. He's always lost enough hair that he knows something that's about what's going on. So let's listen to his advice. What have you learned about how to be a successful human? Well, I'll let others judge you whether I'm a successful human. But I can talk a little bit about my routines. I think I'm fairly boring. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I want to know is what's been going on in the world during the night. Hawaii is, we're at the end of the time zones. And so usually quite a lot has happened in business and politics, socially. So I want to look at the New York Times. I want to read the local paper, catch up with what's going on, find out if anybody is trying to get a hold of me, and just generally sort of orient myself towards the day. And then I like to try and think through what I have to do today, what I want to accomplish. I find it's very important to sort of, even though my calendar, and I think we have this tendency these days to be driven by our smartphones and what our calendar says we should be doing, but try and think through, all right, what are my priorities? What am I working on right now? What do I need to get done? And when am I going to do those things? And I'll look at my calendar and say, right, well, I have this appointment at 10. I have this appointment at 1. So I have an hour or two between 11 and 1 to maybe work on this. What am I going to do later in the day? And so on. So I think, and I try and be more, as they say in the now, than I typically succeeded at being, because I know that's important, because it is easy just to get into the flow of work and you're not really being very mindful about what you're doing and how you're living your life. And so I like to try and take time out for myself along the way, just sort of check in with myself and say, OK, how's my day going? How am I feeling? If I'm annoyed or upset, why am I annoyed or upset? Just not working out and try and take a corrective action before that grows and amplifies itself. And one of your roles is as the chairperson of the Hawaii Angels. Yes. And we have a shot of the website for the Angels. That's a group that's been around for probably 15 years. Right. It's part of your job to coordinate the monthly meetings and other special meetings that happen with specific projects throughout the month and to bring potential investors and companies in and you audition companies. So you're in a leadership position and a part of leadership, would you agree, is transmitting those values that we're talking about? Very much so. And yeah, for those of your viewers who don't know, so Angel organization is very much like the show Shark Tank, but nicer. And we give people more time. And so... I think Shark Tank was modeled on the Angels. Oh yeah, very much so. And the venture capitalist, you know. But it sort of I think is obviously it is a show that's produced for maximum production and audience value with less, I think, regard given to the actual entrepreneurs. And for me, being an angel investor and coordinating the angel network is all about the entrepreneurs. I get a lot out of working with young people with their passion and their excitement about what they're doing. I like to mentor and coach them, help them find money. And I try and do it in a way that's always positive. And you've done that pretty successfully. You've helped to raise $100 million or more. And one shape or another through the angel group or through our ongoing private equity investments, yes. I don't have an exact number, but it is almost at this point, certainly in excess of $100 million here in Hawaii. So you have a... There's a private equity fund that you manage, and that's Kala Hala. Right. We have a shot of that website here, too. Kala Hala Holdings was an entity that I started with a partner back in 2006. Really as an outgrowth of the angel network, because what we found with the angels is we'd seed them a little bit of money and they'd get going, and then they would need a larger sum of money. And because we're not the Bay Area and we don't have a lot of venture capital readily accessible, there was a question that I felt something of a moral duty to try and help these companies that we had nurtured to get to the next level. And so we started Kala Hala, which was an institutional investor, where we could aggregate money from individual investors into a larger sum and then make those investments as well. So I'm usually like you, I'm usually a glass half full kind of guy. Let's just sort of invert that for a moment and look at a glass half empty, sort of, because you do meet a lot of companies who are eager for exposure and they're kids in a garage or they're companies that have been around for 20 years or there's somebody who's looking to make an impact here in the Hawaii market, they come from a lot of different vectors. What are the things that you see that drive you nuts when you see a company that they're just doing things all upside down and wrong? What are the danger signs that you see that you try to either ameliorate or that you use as a screen to just say, thank you very much, see you later? Yeah. Boy, let me count the ways. Unfortunately, there are many different things that disqualify a company. Let me just start with one and maybe talk about a couple of the others. Very commonly, we see what I call the loan inventor, which is somebody that has an idea. They have a product that they believe is a world beater. It's a better mousetrap. And they, per the old saying, expect the world to beat a path to their door. And unfortunately, that's not how the world works. I always tell my students. Not often. There's always a Steve Jobs and a Steve Wozniak in there. Yeah. But I think, well, I think if you look at those people, the point that I'm going to make is without Steve Jobs' exquisite sense of the aesthetic, his understanding of human factors, his ability to negotiate corporate boardrooms and so on, I don't think Apple would be what it is today. And so you get somebody who thinks they have a product that is of enormous value. And I always tell my students, invention is, it's the old saying, it's 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration. And so just because you have something that may have value doesn't automatically mean that it has value today. So the fanatic gleam is not necessarily a guarantor of success. There's a fine line between, with entrepreneurs, between sort of indefatigable optimism and insanity. You've got to have that. Right. Just edging right up. Right. With that thought, let's take a break for a moment, for a station break, and we'll be right back. Hi, I'm Carol Cox. I'm the new host of Eyes on Hawaii. Make sure you stay in the know on Hawaii. Join us on Tuesdays at 12 noon. We will see you then. Aloha. Freedom. Is it a feeling? Is it a place? Is it an idea? At DiveHeart, we believe freedom is all of these and more, regardless of your ability. DiveHeart wants to help you escape the bonds of this world and defy gravity. Since 2001, DiveHeart has helped children, adults, and veterans of all abilities go where they have never gone before. DiveHeart has helped them transition to their new normal. Search diveheart.org and share our mission with others. And in the process, help people of all abilities imagine the possibilities in their lives. You're watching ThinkTech on ThinkTechHawaii.com, which broadcasts five live talk shows from noon to 5 p.m. every weekday, and then streams our earlier shows all night long. Great content for Hawaii from ThinkTech. So we're back with Rob Robinson, and he's talking about things that drive him crazy about entrepreneurs. Number one was the fanatical gleam, with the idea that you have to get right up to the edge of the fanatical gleam and then come back a notch or two before you have a real successful formula. What's another factor that you... Well, and one of the things the fanatical gleam leads to, I thought it's not always a result of that, is a mistaken sense of value. So what private investors do, what venture capitalists do, is essentially what they do in shock tank. Right, is they say, look, I'll give you X amount of money for Y percentage of your company. And generally speaking, if you don't have a company yet, you're looking at a valuation of what you have is maybe worth a million dollars, maybe worth two million dollars on a generous day, less than that on many days. And the entrepreneur will be looking at the end state, five years, 10 years down the road, when they are the head of a multi-billion-dollar corporation, and saying, well, no, this is a 10-billion-dollar idea. There's no way I'm giving you 10% of my company for $100,000, right? And that's a very difficult conversation and a very difficult process to go through. Another one would be the team, who the team is. Do you have the requisite skills, or are you a group of people who will have the same skills, because you all met in the same program in college, and you have a company, and that's great. You've got marketing covered, or whatever it is, but now you need a financial person, you need a CEO, you need an engineer, you know, right? And so are you willing to admit people into your company who are going to have a big chunk of that company in order to turn it into a real company, or are you really just interested in pursuing your dream with your friends, in which case it's probably never going to amount to that much? And there are other ones as well. So as you say, I like to be positive. I find if an entrepreneur is willing to be coached, no matter how misguided they may be initially, we can usually work with them. It's the ones who don't want to be coached to just say, look, give me money and I know what I'm doing that are more problematic. Yeah, the companies that I know that are becoming successful now also have, at the core of them, they have a sense of social responsibility, of sustainability built into the core of their company, not only because it's the right thing to do, but because it makes the most business sense in the long run, and really because a lot of investors are starting to use that as a criterion for evaluating and differentiating between companies. And is that a new trend or is that an old one? Or is this old wine and new bottles? Do you agree with me that this is increasingly important? I would draw perhaps a slightly fine distinction here. I think the whole notion of social impact investing or triple bottom line and whatever you want to call it these days, is a relatively new term and it's one that has gone at great currency in our current market. But I think that if you go back and you look at companies and I mean just what popped into my head when you were talking, is you go back and look at companies like Mary Kay, right? I mean, Mary Kay Cosmetics is not anybody's idea of a socially conscious company, but if you look at the basis on which it was founded, it was in order to help housewives who didn't have an outlet for their business instincts and to provide them with an income to make them more independent of their spouses and in order to empower them, right? And today we would say that's great. That's a socially conscious, female owned business. And I think a lot of businesses, whether or not they are explicitly social impact companies or not, have at their core values about making the world a better place, making people's problems less severe. I mean, if you look at my landsmen, as they say, Elon Musk, right, a lot of what he does is about a vision of a better world, you know, electric cars, space exploration, faster transportation. He doesn't go out and say, you know, I'm a social impact entrepreneur explicitly. But I think those values are quite clear in the things he chooses to do. He doesn't choose to, you know, process baby seals for, you know, coats or anything like that. All of his ideas are multi trillion dollar ideas that work out, but they are also ideas that will transform the way that we see and live and work. Right. And he's a futurist, so his values are about what the world can become. Other people are concerned with the world as it is and how we deal with that, but I think it's all coming from the same place. Right. And I think Hawaii is a particularly Akamai host for those types of ideas. And it probably starts in our original native culture, which somehow infuses the rocks on which we walk. I'm sure you've noticed that. Absolutely. I mean, Hawaii is a very welcoming place, has great family values, has great a great sense of communal communalism, if you will. You know, when we started Angels, we actually had to draw a line and say, however noble the pursuit, the company still has to stand on its own two feet. You know, we would get we were approached by a lot of companies, which were essentially charities or, you know, companies that that didn't have a business model. And we said, you know, Hawaii has a lot of that. And obviously could use more. But if we're going to grow a business sector here that can grow jobs and can provide meaningful employment for our graduates, high school students, my children, your children, you know, we also want to nurture a set of skills that will allow these people to compete in in the larger global economy as well. So we while we we very much embrace the, you know, the notion of family and the notion of social responsibility, we also balance that with the ability to actually sustain yourself economically. Right. I think when I first met you about a dozen years ago or so, we would commonly lament on the relatively sparse resources available for venture capital, yes, on these little rocks in the middle of the Pacific. And there was sometimes an insular sort of set of attitudes that kept us isolated. But I think that started to change. And we've started to open our screens to to to tides that flow in from a lot of different directions, typified by the blue startups and by the various accelerators and incubators coming out of the university and out of out of the state of Hawaii, yes, and some private enterprises as well. Right. So now I think that a healthy ecosystem is starting to develop here that that maximizes the natural advantages that Hawaii has. I agree. Would you agree? How is that showing itself? Well, so this is a glass half full glass half empty kind of issue. I mean, Hawaii is always going to suffer from critical needs. It's going to always have a shortage of investment capital. It's always going to have a shortage of critical talent. And it's always going to have a relative shortage of deal flow compared to, say, the Bay Area. But I don't think the Bay Area gets to be the only place on earth that has innovation and, you know, have a capital venture industry. And as you say, if you look at where we've come from, a dozen or so years ago, to where we are now, it's night and day. And I have to give a lot of credit to a number of people out there, particularly my very good friend, Shinoah Farnsworth, who is the the head of blue startups, which was founded with the help of Hank Rogers from the Tetris company. And also, things like Accelerate UH, and other semi state sponsored entities. So now there are a number of nurturing organizations, accelerators, we call them now we used to call them incubators, right? Mentorship kind of provides mentorship provides a little bit of capital. And also, I think what we've seen as a transformation in our global economy that allows places like Hawaii, thanks to information technology, the internet, e-commerce, and so on, to compete more easily, where location is not everything. And so you take that that combination of factors, you know, we have smart, motivated people here in Hawaii. And I think, as you say, there is a kind of a frothy ecosystem developing where we are improving on those three dimensions, deal flow, critical talent, and available venture capital. And on that note, we're just about finished our program. As always, we run out of time before we run out of words. And maybe there'll be another opportunity for us to sit with Rob Robinson on this topic. And others want to thank Rob for your time today. Thank you for your for your wisdom. And may it continue to accumulate. Let's hope. Thank you.