Steve Gatina discusses leading Helinet as a 29-year-old CEO when tragedy struck the aviation business.
Insight
Gatina: Advising founders against tying identity to startups ignores reality
“You start a company, it's your obsession, it's your identity, and you'll hear people tell you, like,
Oh, like, don't make this your identity, right?
But it's like, yeah, that's nice, but that's not the reality.
Like, this is who I am.”
Insight
Gatina: Scaling to $100M+ revenue requires a multi-business platform model
“What I saw there was that if you could combine the right mix of tools and technologies and talent that you could actually build this platform where you could have multiple businesses that grow at scale. Right. And like, that's how you're getting to like a hund…”
Assertion Supported
Gatina: Helinet provided aerial surveillance as a service to law enforcement
“We just kind of cracked the code at Helinet on being able to provide surveillance as a service. It's a different kind of SaaS business, but where you're basically doing aerial surveillance for law enforcement agencies or clients, right? So it could be DEA, FBI…”
Insight
Gatina: Crisis leadership prioritizes mission first, financials second, and self last
“You break down your perspective into three perspectives. The mission perspective, like what is our mission? And really that's about the customer. Like, what am I supposed to do for the customer? And that's my priority. The second is team. What's the responsibi…”
Assertion Partly supported
Gatina: Religion and spirituality was the top podcast category in audience and creators
“I found out religion and spirituality was actually the number one category of all podcasts in terms of both audience size. So consumers and content creators.”
Opinion
Gatina: Unlike sports with ESPN, faith lacked a centralized digital destination
“The only reason I didn't know about this before is because we don't have a digital destination for faith content. We have a digital destination for sports content, ESPN. It's got all the sports, but why is there no digital destination for faith? That doesn't m…”