Venture Capitalists Nick Hanauer And Richard Barton

Ross Reynolds interviews two prominent Seattle investors about business and politics. Nick Hanauer was the first non-family investor in Amazon. He’s currently a venture capitalist with Second Avenue Partners and a major Democratic donor and activist involved with a variety of causes. Richard Barton is a former Microsoft executive and the founder of the travel website Expedia and the real estate site Zillow. He also supports a number of philanthropic causes, in part through the Barton Family Foundation.

GeekWire writer John Cook picked up this interview and writes:

Both also are extremely outspoken when it comes to politics, sharing some of those opinions in an informative appearance today on The Conversation with KUOW’s Ross Reynolds. It was a wide ranging and fun discussion that touched on everything from the Pets.com sock puppet — a painful reminder to Hanauer of perhaps the “stupidest idea ever conceived by humans” — to Brazilian butt lifts — a popular cosmetic procedure discussed on the community-oriented site RealSelf.

But the discussion started off around philosophy.

“Philosophy is basically a discipline that teaches you how to think, and analyze complicated problems,” Hanauer said of the degree he earned from the University of Washington. “And as entrepreneurs, that’s what we are constantly doing. Rich and I share a passion for disruption — for looking at a circumstance or a problem and finding a profoundly new or transformational way of fixing it or rearranging the pieces.”