Part II: Growing the Best Damn Innovation Ecosystem on the Planet

Years 2019–2024: The Rise of the San Diego Innovation Economy. The Connect / SDVG Merger: Make Good Sh#t Happen & Show Results

Starting again with the chart: The fiscal impact, the result of years of hard work.

The story of the merger actually begins before the merger. I had been working to orchestrate a merger for over a year, and I admittedly pissed off much of the Connect board in the process. (It’s its own story within the story.)

It wasn’t an easy merger to do. Connect was an organization with fifteen employees. SDVG was three. The Connect organization had legacy on its side — which was incredibly valuable. SDVG was rogue, had energy, and momentum. It made great sense to put the two organizations together. Less redundancy in the market, and more combined resources to affect positive change. Connect was strong on the life sciences side, SDVG on tech. Connect had a strong Springboard program to advise companies, and SDVG had access to capital sources.

I’ll spare you all of the people, personality, org chart, board reorganization and political maneuvering that comes with any merger. It’s just a fact, mergers take time.

The post-merger hurdles were real: We were just weeks from missing payroll, Connect’s key employee wanted to move east, we needed to break our office lease, and we owed various people money. Good times. Sounds like a startup.

This recap makes it sound easier than it was. But we got it done.

Some Key Decisions / Actions:

The Board

Our combined board was over 180 people. Comedy, right? Short version: we got it down to 80 and created an Exec Comm of 15.

People often laugh when I mention the size of our board. But they’re wrong. The board is an amazing asset. They each have their networks, and their strengths. They’re an extension of the mission. You need to enable them. Don’t bore them with details. And engage them in areas where THEY want to help, not where you want them to “do stuff for you.”

A second key data point — people often look at boards (not just ours), and think there’s “a lot of older people there.” Wisdom is good. As is millennial enthusiasm. It’s not one or the other. I’ve learned that something magical happens when you pair young entrepreneurial minds with experienced, thoughtful leaders. It’s truly powerful, and the results of “the think” benefits all in the room.

Organizational Infrastructure.

It’s invisible externally. It’s a huge undertaking. But it’s monumentally important. SDVG had been working largely with excel spreadsheets. VC lists. Tech lists. Life Sci lists. CEO lists. Company lists. Membership lists were in a low-cost, third-party software system. Connect’s website was built in Ruby, and no one could edit it. It was a combination of 27 bandages held together with Saran Wrap.

We tried to migrate to Salesforce. It was a mistake. Too much software for a small org. With the help of Greg Smith, Phelan Reissan & Christie Marcella (thank you!) — we migrated to Airtable. It took years. But it WORKS. All those lists, and those names, all those VC relationships — Connect is now, I’m extremely proud to say, an “institution.” It’s not Mike Krenn’s lists or anyone else’s lists. Connect has a foundation at its core — that can always be levered up.

We’re building a new website to match. Ideally the front yard look should look as good as the interior. Hopefully done Q4, 2024.

The Team:

We are a small team. Trying to move an entire community, in the 8th largest city in America. There’s four times fewer VCs in the region than Austin, Seattle, DC, etc. We need to punch above our weight. That requires a team approach. Everyone leads a piece, and everyone chips in across the platform. All programs are intertwined.

We have a long term vision, driven by achieving near and mid-term goals. Together, we create meaningful impact, across the region, at scale, with efficiencies.

I dig our team. You should too. They work hard. They care. And they kick butt.

Some Programs:

Springboard is a cornerstone of Connect’s history and programming. In short, the idea is to bring expert advisors together with early-stage companies, to help them advance to the next stage.

One of San Diego’s great strengths is the breadth of it’s tech and life sciences community. It creates a significant challenge for Springboard. Add in that all companies are at different stages, with unique business challenges. One size does not fit all, and nor should it. Connect’s Springboard program works hard to get the right people in the room, for each given company, given their industry, stage and particular business challenges.

For free.

We made several key modifications to the program in 2020. We made it more modular. Marketing & sales, finance, raising capital — we got it covered. Genomics, Diagnostics, SaaS, AI, Dual Use .. we got that too. We expanded our network of advisors, and together we have advised hundreds upon hundreds of companies at many different levels.

The Cool Companies program was written about earlier in Part I. What I will note here, however, is how absolutely fundamental this program has been to San Diego’s growth. Getting 100+ VCs to San Diego, to meet with vetted startup companies, is a big deal. It’s strange how many people now take it for granted after years of success. This program doesn’t happen in other markets, and it takes a great deal of effort.

It may not be shiny and new, but Connect will not lose sight of this program, and its critical role within our community. Cool Companies is a driver for this regional economy. And Connect will continue to improve processes and leverage this program for the future of the region.

The Airtables:

It’s demonstrably under-appreciated, but incredibily important. We launched our Airtables in 2021. No other market has anything public facing like this. We have two downloadable airtables: (1) one shows all fundings for the last five years; and (2) one shows over 400 venture firms where we have built relationships over the years. Seems easy right? It’s not. It may not be sexy, but the importance and effect of each is incredibly important. They create scale with efficiency.

• The fundings airtable above: We made a conscious choice not to monetize this table. It’s gold. Yet no one need pay us a dime to use it. The obvious question is — if law firms, banks etc have access to this — why support Connect financially? The info is all there. So why does Connect do this? Because the long term benefits to the community outweigh the short term financial contributions:
• We send venture funds to the list all the time. They LOVE it. It generates deal flow interest. It validates our market, and it creates FOMO. We know there have been companies funded, via this table, where our companies don’t even know Connect played a role. Many times — we don’t even hear about these fundings — until years later.
• We send job searchers here. If you want a job in the startup community, where better to look than the list of companies who have raised money? You can find companies that intrigue you personally and professionally. We know companies have found great hires through this effort, having zero knowledge that Connect helped them.
• When I mentioned that we create scale at efficiency — it’s not just a slogan. This is scale done efficiently. As our friend Malin would say — Community Before Self.
• Connect gets zero credit. We get zero dollars. We actually lose money. But it’s been a boon to the growth of this community. That’s what Connect does.

The Other Airtable:

Simply put: There is no other market in the country, where a nonprofit publishes the list of the venture funds they know. Let alone a list 400 firms long, where they can source a deal with credibility.

And oh yeah.. where it’s 100% free of charge for the companies to utilize.

No big whoop. No other region has anything like it.

In late 2021, I was asked to sign a DEI pledge. It was super duper neato keen. We made a decision that day to instead actually DO something.

In 2022 — we recruited Regina Bernal, and launched another first-of-its-kind program, designed to elevate diverse talent within the life sciences and tech industries. XEO is a cohort-based, cross-disciplinary program where diverse talent gets access to industry leaders and behind-the-scenes tours at unique companies such as Illumina, General Atomics, Element Bio, GradLabs, and the Horton Plaza redevelopment project.

Participating companies (who nominate their employees to participate in the cohorts) include Illumina, Dexcom, Groove, Seismic, Airspace, Resmed, Lilly, and many more of San Diego’s leading companies, alongside startups. This program is squarely creating the next generation of leaders in San Diego. It’s absolutely amazing.

A few key points here:

The “cross-disciplinary” piece of this is super important, in two very different ways: (1) it’s across industry: therapeutics, genomics, software, cleantech, comms, etc; and (2) across job disciplines: marketing, finance, bench scientists, founders, operations, etc. We believe that people are better in their roles, if they understand the totality of the business. You’ll be a better marketer, or a better finance person, if you understand the totality of the business.

We hyper accelerate careers. The cohort gets access to both companies and leaders in the course of 12 weeks; access that normally takes a career to develop.

The net result is an alumni group — an incredible network of insanely smart, talented, and motivated individuals. This is YPO, but focused across tech and life sciences, with a bond that is stronger and more diverse. Young, inspired, smart, wanting to create a better world. It’s not a club for those “already there.”

These will be our future leaders. They will be hiring managers. Their influence will expand. In time, we will start to see more and more diversity in the top ranks of our companies. That is how we create lasting cultural change.

Where other orgs talk about change, Connect is creating it.

And note — if you’re reading this from a region outside San Diego, and want to recreate this in your region — we’ll help you.

For years, people in this region lamented about events like SXSW, JPM, and Silicon Slopes. Why doesn’t San Diego have anything similar?

The reality was — it’s hard to do. It’s expensive to do. Launching is incredibly risky. It seemed pretty clear, no one else was going to step up. So we did. Once again.

In the scope of San Diego’s rise — Connect had always been focused, given our limited resources. We started by focusing our message at investors. Get them to San Diego. Then there were complaints around talent. So we expanded our messaging and solved that concern too.

As we executed, San Diego hit number five on the venture market chart. We outpaced Austin, Seattle, Chicago, etc. But with Keith Rabois shouting “Miami” on social media, comically Miami was the new darling region that tech crunch and others would write about. (That is the comedy of social media, btw. They got “likes” and press — we got $20B of capital.)

That said, perception was (and still is) that San Diego is not a top five market, and that what it does have is all biotech.

We are in a position, as a region, to change that perception. Let’s raise San Diego’s image as an innovation hub — on the global stage.

And so once again, Connect jumped in. In 2022 — We launched a takeover of Petco Park, and called it Five.Ten.Thirty.

We know we aren’t going to achieve SXSW status in one year, or even three. But with a long term vision, and near-term goals, we can start the progression. Five.Ten.Thirty was created:

Why 5.10.30? The decisions we make today, make an impact five, ten, thirty years into the future. For ourselves personally, for our businesses, for our community.

Stepping up again, this little nonprofit gathered the community, and took over an entire MLB ballpark to show off our innovation community. The first of its kind — it was the largest innovation event in San Diego history — until we did it again in 2023.

2024 will be bigger still, as we continue to grow this event with a goal of it being a globally recognized event to attend. (See the 2023 video here.)

2024 began with the launch of the Tree Lady Foundation — a philanthropic fund designed to invest in early stage startups. Years in the making, the fund will make its first investments in June 2024.

You can learn more about the TL Fund in the next article — our current phase of operations.

POST NOTES:

Another under-appreciated San Diego treasure is the SBDC (the Small Business Development Center). Connect might not exist, and this region might not be anywhere near where it is in the venture rankings — without the support of the SBDC.

With the merger, we met Danny Fitzgerald and Marquise Jackson. They have been unwavering supporters, and our collaboration has grown over the years. San Diego is lucky to have these gents.

There are many others as well. There’s individuals at all of our universities — also unheralded — who have played a big role in the rise of San Diego as a region.

(It’s important to dig deeper. There are always a lot of voices, but it’s often the people you don’t hear or know — who are the ones doing the work, to create the change we all want.)

The Connect Team:

Cait Kelly, Petra Stegmann, Christie Marcella, Tre Braquet, Taryn Goode, Gretel von Son, Matt Alamo, Sam DeLeon, Val Reyes, Kylie Alsonso