The late Bill Otterson’s passion helped nurture the tech industry.

Four years after the death of founding director Bill Otterson, UCSD Connect is conducting its second search for a replacement. The program in technology and entrepreneurship also is doing some soul-searching.

In just a few years after its founding in 1985 by Otterson and Mary Walshok, now associate vice chancellor of UCSD, Connect became central to San Diego’s technology industry. Its blend of workshops and meetings brought together technologists, business people and financial types, along with plenty of good old-fashioned networking.

At the center: the charismatic Otterson, and a team of trusted associates such as Bryna Kranzler, Abi Barrow and Andrea Moser. Visiting Connect became a pilgrimage, for San Diegans and for a stream of visitors from all over the world who sought to bring the San Diego magic to their homelands.

But Otterson’s successor, Fred Cutler, resigned last fall after three years on the job. Cutler, although respected for his own accomplishments, did not have Otterson’s local connections or Otterson’s charisma. Cutler also had the bad luck to come in just when the technology bubble was bursting.

The sort of deal-making Connect thrived on fell off. The unabashed techno-optimism Connect symbolized seemed out of step with the times. Meanwhile, the emerging industries of telecom and biotech grew up, developing their own support networks.

Can Connect find anyone else like Bill Otterson? Has Connect grown itself out of a job? These are the questions Walshok must contend with as UCSD tries to bring back Connect’s old magic.

Irresistible Force

To answer these questions, it’s helpful to take a look back at how Connect came about in the first place: There was a need for it, and the Walshok/Otterson team was perceptive enough to tap into it in a way no one had before. The two understood and complemented each other. As a respected academic, Walshok was the university liaison who explained and at times defended Otterson’s cut-to-the-chase methods to the academic bureaucracy.

Otterson served as a fearless ambassador of the Connect message to the business community, preaching free-market orthodoxy in a heretical fashion. So from its beginning, Connect was never a typical academic or business organization. It was a hybrid that worked in ways people weren’t used to seeing. It was a program of UCSD Extension, but it enveloped the most dynamic elements of San Diego’s thriving technology community.

Marco Thompson, chairman of the San Diego Telecom Council and a friend of Otterson, recalls being impressed that Otterson spent his first two years setting up Connect without a salary.

“When Bill started, this city had no infrastructure,” Thompson says. “By that I mean there weren’t national law firms, all the service providers. By the mid-’90s there was a large representation and Bill Otterson and Connect were responsible for a good part of it.”

Otterson tackled this job with total directness, buttonholing people and convincing them to join Connect and donate money to it.

Guy Iannuzzi, a founder of the marketing, graphics and public relations firm Mentus, is one of many who succumbed to Otterson’s powers of persuasion. Iannuzzi had no use for Connect. Mentus was not a high-tech or biotech company, so he couldn’t professionally justify putting the money or time into such an organization.

But Otterson forcefully batted away all objections. It wasn’t a pitch to altruism, to bettering San Diego or even to improving the overall business climate. It was Otterson speaking in a language any hard-headed business executive could understand: a call to naked self-interest.

Otterson was even better than his word. He became Mentus’ most hard-core salesman, even to the point of Iannuzzi’s embarrassment. “You should do business with this guy!” Otterson would say to people when introducing them to Iannuzzi.

With nothing to lose, and a vision to fulfill, Otterson simply didn’t believe in dawdling on the formalities. Mentus remains a Connect member. “It was the best decision I ever made,” Iannuzzi says.

Before Connect: Nothing To Prove

Otterson didn’t need to build a reputation or earn riches: he’d done both as a successful businessman. His feats included turning around a troubled computer tape drive company, Cipher Data Products, and taking it public.

“We don’t need more money,” his widow, Anne Otterson, recalls him saying. “We have enough to live comfortably and educate our children and that’s all that matters.”

Otterson also knew he was going to die. In 1979, he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a deadly cancer affecting bone marrow. The knowledge of eventual death liberated him, Anne Otterson says: He felt free to take chances and do daring things.

“Everybody’s going to die, they just don’t know when,” Anne Otterson recalls her husband saying.

Otterson began chemotherapy, and meditation and spent time delving into his religious faith. Eventually his health stabilized. With no need to work, Otterson tried to enjoy the life of a retired executive. He failed miserably.

“He started a leasing company just to have something to do, and pretty soon he was hiring a secretary, and that was out of the home,” Otterson says. “Pretty soon I was fixing lunch for the secretary and Bill. He would never have retired.”

Mary Walshok says Connect can keep San Diego a welcoming place for startups.

Then through Anne, Bill Otterson heard of Walshok’s idea for Connect. He met with Walshok and then-UCSD Chancellor Richard Atkinson, but was dubious at first, thinking it was a bureaucratic sinecure.

“Bill said, ‘I would never suck at the public trough’,” Anne Otterson says. “She said, ‘You wouldn’t, Bill. You’d have to raise your own money.’ He was off and running.”

What’s Next?

There’s a paradox in filling the Connect director’s vacancy, Iannuzzi says: Otterson’s success was attributable as much to his stage in life and health as to his personality and experience.

“Bill was a wild card. No way on earth would somebody like Bill have taken charge of Connect unless he had nothing to lose,” Iannuzzi says. “The dilemma is, the kind of person who would want the position or take it, is the last person that should be given the position. You need a charismatic individual, who’d want to get things done, who the business community would respect deeply, who actually can bully, in a nice way, like Irwin Jacobs. How do you get somebody like that? You want somebody who does not need the job. Somebody who would be a gadfly in some ways, but also a mentoring individual in other ways, who would respect the process, but not hold the process paramount. In other words, he would tell the institution to go to hell when necessary. There were times when Bill told the (UCSD) administration to go to hell, which made it successful. We knew he was not beholden to them. With Bill, the membership came first, the university second, and it worked magically. Most of the universities that have tried to create these types of programs, no matter how enlightened they might be, don’t do that.”

Thompson wouldn’t disagree with that analysis, but he has a few other suggestions. The next director needs to have a life science background, he says, because licensing from UCSD is predominantly in that area.

Secondly, Connect needs to get physically re-connected with UCSD. Its current off-campus location, while only a few miles away, still discourages that mix of spontaneous conversation and happenstance that could occur when academics ambled over on impulse.

Innovation Incubator

If Connect hasn’t yet found a replacement for Bill Otterson, at least Walshok and others involved with Connect say they know what role the organization should play: to nurture innovation and encourage new ideas and companies.

“There still isn’t anybody who’s nurturing those early stage companies,” says Barrow, who’s now managing director of the UCSD Von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement. Barrow says Connect is complementary to, not duplicative of the San Diego Telecom Council and other trade groups.

“Connect is never going to get into the depth that the Telecom Council has with their (special interest groups),” Barrow says. “There’s room in the technology sector in San Diego.”

Walshok, who writes academically about the process of innovation, says Connect, by spanning technological boundaries, helps catalyze discoveries and products that don’t fit nicely inside the disciplinary walls that people erect in science and technology.

“One of the key elements of innovative environments is you have what’s called knowledge spillover,” Walshok says. “It’s spilling over the edges and people are picking up the information from one another, because they participate in lots of networks and lots of programs. It’s not transactional. It’s relational. It’s more than tech transfer, because these tech transfer offices are all about legal and business arrangements. Connect creates a climate for deal-making. It nurtures the pool of people who put the deals together.”

More than just knowledge and connections, trust is part of the efficiency Connect creates, Walshok says.

“The higher the risk, the more important is trust and mutual respect. Why would you enter into a high-risk relationship with a perfect stranger?” Walshok asks. “And so a lot of what Connect did was create a community where people felt comfortable with one another. They knew one another. They felt trusting. So when it was time to do a high-risk venture deal, they knew something about the chemistry. Everyone who writes about Silicon Valley describes it that way. And it’s lost something of that because it’s become dominated by big companies. The Silicon Valley is not as good a place for small companies today as San Diego is. And San Diego can continue to be a good place for small companies and startups if Connect focuses on that.”