Drew Oetting
Sponsored by MidWestOne Bank, this is the latest edition of the CBJ’s new podcast feature with Nate Kaeding and notable Iowa business and cultural leaders, available first to CBJ members. Listen to this episode below, and subscribe on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and SoundCloud.
By Nate Kaeding
news@corridorbusiness.com
Iowa City native Drew Oetting has built a reputation as a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who can see around corners. A founding partner of San Francisco-based 8VC at just 24 years old, Drew has an innate nose for business opportunities that can improve people’s lives. His firm has invested in some of the most promising startups in the fields of bio-IT, health tech, govetech and logistics, among others, with an overarching goal of helping “fix the world.”
Most recently, Drew made headlines in the Wall Street Journal for helping to create Operation Masks, a cobbled-together nonprofit operation that has leveraged its connections to help secure and distribute millions of masks and other pieces of personal protective equipment (PPE) to hospitals and health care providers across the country. An Iowan at heart, he’s humble about the efforts, but it has helped protect hundreds of thousands of health care workers, including those here in the Corridor.
“We tried to just chip away at a small part of it, and just connect regardless of where we came from,” he told me during our recent phone conversation. “We have zero financial interest in any of this – it’s mostly just, can we use our network and our time to increase the chances that a hospital could find supply?”
Drew and I spoke about his whirlwind path to success before age 30, his eye-opening foray into opportunity hunting that took him to Mongolia, and investing lessons from some of the best in the business:
Drew, talk a bit about your upbringing in Iowa City and how that helped shape your outlook on business and investing.
I grew up in Iowa City and went to West High School. I think growing up in Iowa City had a huge bearing on where I am today. My parents are physicians at the University of Iowa. The education that I got in Iowa City was tremendous and at the same time, being a very normal place to grow up with great people and people who work hard and have a strong desire to push things forward. I went to California to college. I studied math and economics at Claremont McKenna, where I became excited by entrepreneurship and investing. I was fortunate early on, basically right out of college, to get introduced to my current business partner, technology entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale.
I got introduced to him right out of college and was kind of working for him. He was the CEO of a business that he had started called Addepar, which was a wealth management technology company. That was my start and we’ve worked together ever since and built up 8VC, which is a venture capital business managing about $3.5 billion, primarily focused on investing in health care, logistics, financial services and government technologies.
When you were in Iowa City, was there entrepreneurial blood flowing through your veins, or was it something you fell in love with once you got out to California?
I think the biggest thing is, there’s a lot more latitude, more degrees of freedom growing up in Iowa City, at least when I was growing up there. We would roam around as kids. We would set up our own football games and sort of de facto sports leagues and wander the city. That’s so different than what I see in New York or San Francisco or L.A. Everything is really scheduled and very controlled by parents.
Secondly, I became obsessed with investing. I was 14. Probably because I took this AP economics class at West High, where the professor was great. My parents were supportive of that, and I was given a lot of latitude to explore what I was interested in.
Read the full interview with Dara Schmidt in the May 4 print or digital editions of the CBJ. Not a CBJ member? Join today.
