UAA College of Business and Public Policy

The College of Business and Public Policy's Tom Case Leadership Fellows Program pairs high-performing CBPP students with a mentor in the Anchorage business community, giving students the opportunity to learn about real-world leadership from local business leaders. To begin the program, each student protégé interviewed their new mentor.

Today’s featured protégé/mentor interview is Nathanial Shoya Watanabe, and his mentor Mead Treadwell, Pt Capital.

1 Where are you from? How did you decide to pursue a career in Alaska?  
“I was born in Connecticut, and grew up there. In summers, we went to Northern Michigan where in high school and college I worked as a farm hand in cherry orchards, sold fudge, stained glass lamps and other souvenirs to tourists, and later was a resort waiter and bartender. In Connecticut, we lived in the rural part of the state, and I always loved the outdoors, I loved fishing, skiing, and hiking.

I had a Kansas-based grandmother who took me up to Alaska the year I graduated from high school. Before that, I happened to have lunch with a distinguished alumnus from my high school named Ernest Gruening who was a Territorial Governor and one of the first US senators from Alaska.

He said, ‘Young man, you cannot go to Alaska for just three weeks – I have been living there for 30 years and I still haven’t seen everything I have wanted to see. Plan to at least spend the summer.’

On our way up, I read a book by another former Governor and US Interior Secretary from Alaska, Wally Hickel, called Who Owns America? describing the opportunities in Alaska. I had been a US Senate Page so I was kind of familiar with working with big guys in government. By then, I had met presidents, vice presidents, all the Senators even though I was only 18 years old. I went to ask for advice on working in Alaska for the summer after an Aleutians ranch job I’d lined up fell through. Malcolm Roberts, one of the Governor’s assistants received me. He invited me to meet Governor Hickel.

I came back the next morning, and Wally said, ‘I cannot afford to pay you, but you can work here anyway.’ Thirty years later, we had done joint investments together and I'd served in his cabinet; I'm glad he let me work there. That summer, he enlightened me to such cool opportunities in Alaska, I have not wanted to live anywhere else.”

2 Where did you go to college? What did you study in college? 
“I was an undergraduate at Yale University. I went in expecting to study economics, had advanced placement in economics, did not do very well in my first midterm, then had a fight with the Nobel prize-winning chairman of the economics department because I was a reporter and wrote a story in the newspaper that he did not like. So I majored in history. I focused my history studies on the settlement in the western United States, and diplomacy as related to natural resources. I wrote a lot of papers on things like Alaska’s Fur Seal Treaty in 1905, the fish war we had in Japan in 1937, on how we made Law of the Sea work to protect our salmon. My diploma says history, I really was studying oceans and the settlement of the trans-Mississippi west, and how frontiers work – so I majored in Alaska. Then for graduate school I went to Harvard Business School.”

3 Did you have anyone you relied on for mentorship/solid career advice? If yes, what is the most important leadership advice they shared with you? 
“Larry Carpenter, a former Fairbanks legislator and businessman, was part of a group that hired me to try to build a cellphone system in just as that technology was getting started in 1982. He said that, ‘the most important thing in business is to keep your word.’ If you are known as a guy that can keep his word, Larry stressed, then you are known as a trustworthy guy, and people are more willing to do business with you. That is the easiest thing to lose, the most important thing to keep – is your trustworthiness.

Wally Hickel said, ‘Stay free,’ ‘If you don’t owe money, you can’t go broke,’ and ‘You have to use your heart as well as your head.’ I actually have a list of dozens of pieces of advice that Wally gave me (and many others), but his main advice – Stay Free – is on his tombstone. His mentorship on staying free was this: in business or politics, don’t let anybody own you.

Another thing he said is that ideas are worth more than money, and that is so true, and is so hard that it is so true. In early 1995, a friend of mine called me from Portland, Oregon and said that he had invented this thing called digital watermarking. And I said everything is about to go digital. We were playing CDs, but there was no such thing as an MP3. I mean, an MP3 player was coming along, but there was no such thing as really bringing music down a wire. Our cable boxes were analog cable boxes, so that we didn’t have 200 channels, we had, like, 20 and we were going towards digital video. I said, ‘Geoff, you have found the holy grail!’ The holy grail is that, if you are going to have perfect digital copies of music or video, or printing, you’ve got to be able to prove it's yours.

So Hickel’s advice was right, that idea was more important than money. He joined me in helping to start the company, which later went public on Wall Street and continues to do well. My goal after that – advice I’d give to any startup tech investor: ‘Find the inevitable, invest in the team that is going to make the inevitable happen.’

It’s funny, at a Harvard business school class, our finance professor, Wes Marple, stood up one time and said, ‘I’ve got two pieces of advice for you; rich is better, don’t go broke.’ Rich is better, in other words, try to figure out the opportunities for your companies or for your ventures, or enterprises that will return wealth to your investors. That is better. Pick those things.

Dr. George Kozmetzky had another line. George was the cofounder of Teledyne, and was one of the directors of Michael Dell’s company that makes computers. George was also the founding Dean of the University of Texas business school. He joined the Board of the Alaska Science and Technology Foundation at Gov. Steve Cowper's invitation to come up here regularly, and mentored Alaskan growth businesses. We got to become very good friends and looked at a larger number of startups together. During one particularly difficult time I was having with others in a company and who was in charge, George said, ‘It doesn’t matter what your title is in your company, as long as it’s owner.’”

5 It is important and beneficial for CBPP and Anchorage’s business community to collaborate and invest in the next generation of leaders. What do you think should be conveyed to our next generation of leaders?
“Be constantly on the outlook for opportunity and prepare yourself to make opportunities happen.”

6 CBPP will be highlighting each mentor and protégé pairing on the front of it’s website during the academic year. Do I have your permission to have this interview and our mentor/protégé pairing highlighted on the website? Is there anything else you would like to add?
“Sure. I have mentored kids in the past, I consider it part of giving back to the community that gave me mentorship. What I look for in this is a lifelong friendship. All I am saying is stay in touch, because a mentorship is almost like a common thing – I get vicarious pleasure from watching my protégés succeed.”