Spotlight Series Ep. 2: Rep. Nick Begich

**David Zell** (0:07)
All right.
Well, Congressman, welcome to PubKey. Welcome to BPI. It's great to have you here.

**Nick Begich** (0:13)
Thanks. Great to be back.
Love the space and love what you're doing over here at BPI.

**David Zell** (0:18)
Well, we feel similarly about you. And you've kind of come on the scene relatively recently. This is your first tenure in Congress, and you've had a huge splash in Bitcoin, in crypto land. You kind of hit the ground running and have kind of clearly pulled away from a lot of your colleagues in terms of just being one of the most obviously technically competent and knowledgeable people. I mean, you really have a deep understanding of Bitcoin and the underlying technology, and it shows every time that you talk. And I remember when I first encountered you, I looked into your background and I saw that in a prior life, you had been a technology founder, a company founder, and it made perfect sense. So I kind of wanted to start this interview maybe before your political career.
What was your entrepreneurial journey? I know you started a tech company and you got into Bitcoin and found it pretty early. Can you wind back the clock and tell us what your background in tech was?

**Nick Begich** (1:20)
Yeah, I'll start a little bit earlier. I think it's relevant. Undergraduate at Baylor University with a focus in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship was something that I've always been very interested in. I believe that value is created in the private sector, and the bulk of that value is often created by entrepreneurs. One of the things I like to tell people and remind people of is, nearly every big company that you see was once a small business.
You would think that large companies own the innovation arc because they own the customer relationship, but the reality is that every significant disruption that has ever occurred in the private sector has come from an innovation of some kind that tends to flow out of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so, entrepreneurship was my major. I ended up out of college working for a publicly traded company on the NYSE as an investor relations specialist. So, part of my job was to facilitate the financial discussions around the company with Wall Street analysts that covered the company. And went from there, got an MBA at Indiana University with a focus in information technology and decision sciences. And so, decision sciences is sort of risk analytics, Monte Carlo simulation, forecasting, linear and non-linear optimization, utilizing these tools to improve the quality of business decisions that you're making. So, this is pretty early. This is back in 2002, that I graduated from Indiana. And I went to work at Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. Initially, as a technology manager, I spent a year cross-functionally as a product marketing manager for upstream products in the car group.
And really enjoyed the opportunity. We were one of the largest companies in the world at that time. Still a huge company now, but at the time, top five with over 400,000 employees worldwide. So going from a smaller company, that publicly traded company that I mentioned earlier, was about 6,500 employees worldwide. Significantly larger footprint, significantly larger scope in terms of projects. But I ended up moving back to Alaska after my experience at Ford, and started a software development company.
My background and interest in the entrepreneurial ecosystem drove some of that thinking. Started with a credit card and a laptop, and grew to about 150 employees across three countries. A lot of the work that we did was focused on early stage companies. We worked some in the enterprise as well, but a lot of our work was with early stage companies, and I'm talking PowerPoint deck forward. Founder comes in, says, hey, I've got this great idea for a business. Can you help me build it? What happens a lot of times with early stage founders, of course, is that they're capital constrained, sometimes severely capital constrained. They're paying for these initial MVP products historically, out of pocket or with friends and family money, and they're just trying to build some customer validation and product validation around their concept and see if there's a product market fit in their business. What we would do is we'd help them build that product, we'd coach those companies, and a lot of times we'd end up taking equity stakes in those companies. And so that was a great way to assist a number of companies get off the ground. Most of the time, if they were successful, they would go on and they would hire their own teams internally. They'd raise their venture rounds, they'd build their customer base, would remain in advisory capacity with them to help move them through those major milestones and out of the valley of death into something that was cash-flow positive.