For a man who bashed his face in a few weeks ago, Mark Kvamme looks and sounds remarkably good.
My whole face was totally smashed in – broke most of the bones in my face. I’m “titanium man” – I’d look like the Terminator if you took an x-ray of me.”
Kvamme had a serious accident on a motocross track in Licking County last month, which required major surgery to fix a bashed eye socket and other bones. The accident did little to quell the controversy that’s surrounded Kvamme almost since he was appointed to head the private entity JobsOhio, which will be created out of the Ohio Department of Development as part of Gov. John Kasich’s campaign to shake up state government and create a more friendly climate for business. After a lawsuit challenged Kvamme’s eligibility to head a state agency as a resident of California, he was named the governor’s director of job creation. He says one of the state’s biggest problems – as he sees it – is that there’s too little equity investment in Ohio.
“The total amount of venture capital invested in the state of Ohio is $150 million. To put it into perspective, California is about $11 billion. My firm alone did in about a month $150 million. There’s not enough equity capital in this state. So by establishing JobsOhio, we will be able to attract world class investment managers to help us find those different opportunities in Ohio.”
Critics have worried about the kinds of jobs that will be created for average Ohioans, but Kvamme says the talent in Ohio and the state’s location will help bring what he calls high paying great jobs. Once the budget passes, the state’s liquor distribution business will be leased for around 1.2 billion, and that money will go into JobsOhio as private money to be invested in companies and business opportunities. And he says the return on those investments will be one of the ways Ohioans will be able to track success…or the inevitable failures.
“We will make mistakes. As I like to say it, lemon happens before lemonade. The companies that don’t do well go out of business. The ones that do well take time. In fact, at one of the companies I was the founding investor in, LinkedIn, I started in 2003. It was just announced they’re going public for over a $3 billion valuation. That took eight years.”
Kvamme says there will be strict criteria in who can appointed by the governor to the JobsOhio board, and while theoretically they could be campaign donors, he says they won’t be paid to serve on the board, and there will be a strict code of ethics that will require them to abstain if there’s a conflict of interest to abstain. And he says publicly available annual reports, audits from the state, the IRS and a private auditor will show what JobsOhio is doing. But what Kvamme is doing is a bit unclear. He slipped this surprise into the interview….
“By the way, I’m becoming an Ohio resident, I’m in the process.”
But he says he’s not doing it to get the JobsOhio director’s position, nor even to secure a place on the board. In fact, he’s not saying what he’s going to do once he moves to Ohio.
“I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve made a lot of money. I don’t need to make any more money. I want to really figure out how we can – I mean, as Ohio goes, so goes the United States. If we can fix what’s going on here with some of these innovative programs and what the governor is doing, I think it will reverberate throughout the whole 50 states, and that’s what exciting to me.”
As for the changes Gov. Kasich has made, Kvamme says he didn’t work on anything related to collective bargaining or the estate tax, but he says soon there will be a proposal related to capital gains that he says – quote – “has my fingerprints all over it”.