SALT LAKE CITY — "Could you imagine? I mean, interviewing anybody and then within an hour, having them become the victim of a brutal assassination.”
Andrew Smith, the Managing Director of the restaurant-centric Savory Fund, recalled being the last person to interview conservative activist Charlie Kirk before Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10.
Every year, Savory gathers restaurant entrepreneurs to have them hear from other entrepreneurs. Kirk’s cousin works for Savory and suggested him as a possible guest at this month's gathering.
So Smith got Kirk on a Zoom call.
"And I think about halfway through that 45-minute conversation, I said, 'Charlie, you're an incredible business mind,'” said Smith. ”And he goes, 'Well, I think so.” I'm like, 'No, you're 31 years old. You're an incredible entrepreneur. You should come tell that story.' And he goes, “Oh my gosh, I would love to.'"
As Kirk was scheduled to appear at the UVU rally, he agreed to an interview with Smith at The Depot in downtown Salt Lake City in front of all the entrepreneurs before his campus engagement.
During the course of the sit-down interview, Smith talked with Kirk about a wide range of business topics that apply to entrepreneurs. Kirk founded Turning Point, USA in 2012, which has become a large organization of conservative young people, mainly on college campuses around the United States, but also with chapters overseas.
Since the founding of Turning Point, USA, Kirk has also ventured into other businesses that had given him a broad and deep understanding of how to start and run a business.
Kirk emphasized during his interview with Smith that he was married and had two children.
“It's a lot, especially as an entrepreneur, right? There are practices that we have to sustain to keep it all together,” said Kirk, referring to observing the Sabbath by resting and not working.
The closest Smith and Kirk came to discussing politics during the interview was the acknowledgment that Kirk has people who oppose him, facetiously saying he has “nothing but supporters.”
The pair also discussed helping GenZers to succeed in the workplace. Kirk had 1,000 working for him before his death.
"In the ideal world, you have a clear set of articulated values for your company that is no more than one page, maybe two pages,” explained Kirk. “And in the onboarding process of onboarding a GenZer, you don’t just recite it, you get buy-in as to what those values are.”
When talking about buying and selling companies, and the millions of dollars involved, Kirk said in reference to not being caught up in materialism, “You need to enjoy every day… because the reward is actually the process. It's the process of solving problems."
The full interview can be found here.
About one hour later, Kirk was at UVU, where 20 minutes into taking questions and debating students, a single shot rang out, hitting Kirk in the neck, fatally wounding him. Smith and the other entrepreneurs were still gathered at The Depot when they got the news.
"We were all reeling," said Smith, "because he was just in front of all of us, and for my audience, for my team, for all of us, we just stood there in disbelief that, no, that's not possible. It's not possible that that just happened. He was just here, full of life, and to go from full of life to he's gone. It was, it was really hard to reel that in your head."
Smith said he knew very little about Charlie Kirk before the process of getting him to come speak, and laments that their new friendship barely even started before Kirk’s death.
"I had no idea who I was sitting with and the conversation we were going to have, and how this would turn out,” Smith said. “I didn't know. But I feel the responsibility to make sure I get out the other side of it [who Kirk was], because I feel like he was way more than a sound bite. Or a headline, he just was."
