Lessons - Bridging Private Innovation With Public Problems | Keith Krach, Chairman & CEO of DocuSign

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. You effectively brought in some of the top talent in Silicon Valley. You applied that to an actual administration and you brought them in and now you're actually solving problems at the speed and with the lens that a Silicon Valley exec would look at a problem versus a career politician. So that's something that can actually make incredible moves. When you go down this path where you move from private, you end public and you move from that into government, talk about the current state of China, of what they have under their control, what they're trying to do, how does that impact us, for example, even if I think about foreign investment into startups in the US, what do we have to be wary of? How do we fight back against that? Sure, I kind of had a chance to see it my whole life because what I could see through the years, through my dad's company back in Ohio and the Midwest, I could see that China's weapons of mass production had devastated the heart of our economic engine. That's small and medium-sized manufacturers. When I was a vice president, General Motors, I could see if you built a plant in China, you weren't just giving them the blue prints. You were giving them the process engineer how to build it and also training their people so they could come back and compete against you. I also, when I was at Ariba, we had our intellectual property stolen from Alibaba and now what we see, the reality we face as a nation and as a free world is seemingly ceaseless intense variation of weaponized economic competition because our rivals are playing the long game they're playing for keeps. They're playing a four-dimensional game of military, economic, diplomatic and cultural chess and at the intersection point and in the primary battleground is technology and worst of all, these authoritarian regimes have no respect whatsoever for rule of law, for property of all kinds, for sovereignty of nations, for human rights, for the environment, for the press and you know, we have to raise our game and there is nothing static about super power advantage and the world needs American leadership. So that's what, you know, this was all about and when I had my Senate confirmation here and I had a good fortune, the rare fortune of being unanimously confirmed was I got asked by Senator Coons and he said, he, what would your strategy be to combat China's economic aggression and I said, I would harness US's three biggest areas of competitive advantage by rallying and unifying our allies and our friends by leveraging the innovation and the resources of the private sector and by amplifying the moral high ground of democratic values and that turned out to be an enduring model now that is used in the Biden administration to combat that aggression and it was that strategy combined with that trust principle that enabled us to defeat that master plan for 5G. We also used it to create a thing called the blue dot network which is an equitable and unifying alternative to what China has called the one belt one road or some Malaysian finance minister called the one belt one way toll road to Beijing. This is where China goes all over the world and creates these debt traps with these low income nations, takes advantage, build their infrastructure, puts their, you know, literally devastates the environment. They also really take advantage of the people in that country. They don't leave them with any skills and they leave them strapped for cash. So we also used it in strengthening US Taiwan ties so I was the highest state department official to visit Taiwan in 41 years. I was greeted with 40 fighters and bombers and we used that trust principle put together a thing called the economic prosperity partnership and a number of other things. We used that to call out the human rights abuses against the weaker Muslims in a western part of China called Xinjiang and on July 4th, 2020, on national TV, I called it, we called out that genocide, first government official do that and so that trust principle was really the basis of everything.