Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/308706
t m c ยป p u l s e | m a y 7, 2 0 1 4 16 paul W. hobby, chairman of the greater houston partnership, discusses his family's political legacy, his own career path, and the future of houston's economic development. iNdUSTRy SPOTLigHT Q | Tell us a bit about your formative years. A | I'm a Houston guy. I was born on Southgate, over by Rice Village. We moved to South Blvd. when I was a year old and my parents still live in that house. We lack imagination, geographically. We tend to stay where we are. Q | So what led you to eventually head off to the University of Virginia? A | Well, it's hard to apply logic to teenage decisions, but it was a pretty good decision. I wanted to get away. I was not rebellious and I didn't have any anxiety about my family, but Houston was a small town and everybody knew who I was. The idea of going to create my own space in a place where I was anonymous was pretty exciting. As soon as I walked onto the University of Virginia campus, I just felt that warm, fuzzy thing. And I trusted my gut, and it was a good decision. A lot of my family members, including my sister, her two girls and my three children, have gone to UVA. So be careful about your teenage decisions, because much can come from them. Q | What led you back to the University of Texas and into law? A | I took a year off and campaigned for my father. He was in a campaign cycle, so I did the small towns. There are lots of those in Texas, and he needed family members to help cover a space this big. So I did a lot of public speaking on behalf of my dad for nine months, and then he won. I had applied to law school and gotten in to UT and deferred my admission for a year, and the decision was whether to pursue the waiting list at Stanford, where I was, or to go to Texas. And probably an offhand comment by my father broke the tie. He said, 'Well, that's going to be your professional network for the rest of your life. Why wouldn't you be classmates with the people that are otherwise going to be around you in the professional world in Texas?' And that's probably good advice. Austin is where I met my wife, so that sort of settles the matter. Q | Your grandfather served as the governor of Texas, and your father served as lieutenant governor for 18 years. How has that shaped you as an individual? A | Well, I don't know. Not trying to be glib, but people always asked me things like that growing up and they would say, 'What's it like having an airport named after you?' And I would say, 'What's it like not?' The point is, I have always been me, and so I don't really know what it was like to be someone else. But I was keenly aware of the fact that if I got in trouble, it was in the newspaper. Maybe that had some salutary affect on my conduct. In any event, I think it gave me tremen- dous exposure. I got to go to a lot of small towns and run a lot of parades, and meet a lot of people that were nominally very powerful on the outside, who were just regular small, vulnerable folks on the inside. In those days, campaigns weren't so expensive. So candidates would stay at our house when they were in Houston. They would show up after their last event, they would have