Firekart
plus
ça change, plus c'est la même
International Bright Young Things, Revisited. March 2010
Interview with Brad Hatchett, Part One: Bogata. April 2010
The Next Big Thing? - April 2010
Interview with Brad Hatchett, Part One. Bogata
Reproduced
with kind permission from Hello! Consultant magazine
April 2010
By Michaela Viaduct
Hatchett is
a man often mentioned in the same sentence as the phrase “seemingly
untouched by the rough hands of time”. I remember meeting him for
the first time, a decade ago, at a party he hosted at his London residence.
He showed me a picture of his father teaching him, at the age of six,
how to shoot a rifle in the lush forests on the outskirts of his hometown
in Canada. I was struck at the time by how almost exactly completely identical
he looked the same as his father in that picture.
As I nurse another glass of Jack in the business lounge at Terminal Four, (we were delayed; another rag-head with an undeclared vial of certain death for all I know), I contemplate the man I will meet in seventeen hours time.
In the past, Brad Hatchett has been inspirational, boorish, insightful and corrupt. Sometimes he has been all four at the same time. He’s (apparently) flown helicopters in the Vietnam war, built a scale model of the Paris metro in his Austin, Texas office and found the time to build his pharmaceutical company AppliedPharma into a worrisome rival to the big four. But to us, Hatchett will be most vividly recalled as the man who changed the game at paradigm-breaking bit crunchers Firekart.
Which Hatchett will
I find when the inch thick bulletproof doors of the Hotel Zurdos silently
slide open and usher me into the air conditioned haven of the Esquizoide
Bar?
-------------
A longhaul trans-Atlantic flight, one international connection and a lengthy
dispute about lost luggage is not my preferred preparation for insightful
interviews particularly with a person as hard to handle as Hatchett. Fortunately
an acquaintance of mine from a previous visit whisked me from the airport
to my hotel and made sure I arrived at Zurdos full of enthusiasm.
Hatchett was late. I spent the time networking with other media types who were very interested in my take on today’s journalism and how my articles subtly light contemporary business issues from unconventional angles through contrast with the must-print stories of the dot com boom. We could have talked for hours, but I had a job to do. When he finally arrived, I am sure there was a hush at the bar and even more certain the lights flickered.
Obviously there was a certain amount of catch-up to do and the first couple of hours were a riot of remembrances, shared experiences and so on and so forth. I was surprised to find my notebook plainly empty when the live music started at ten. We hadn’t even eaten lunch yet.
The first, and I confess only thing I noted was that the guest pianist that night was from a group called Autobuses Reemplazar los Trenes, hot - I am told - on the Bogata latino rap music scene. Throughout the five-hour set that followed Hatchett would go on to tell me all there is to know about investing in the things which bring you happiness, one-sided bets and unlimited expense accounts. Column space and an editor with some kind of obsessive disorder with deadlines means these must wait for another issue. However my nose for an interesting line in intrigue led me to question Hatchett on so-called Operation Bodycount. This snippet of audio covertly recorded in a quiet moment gives a foretaste of revelations to come.