A Reluctant Entrepreneur Bringing Bioinformatics Startup to San Diego

A couple of years ago, Peter Dresslar saw an opportunity to start his own company when he was working as an information science consultant for a big corporation he describes only as the world’s largest research-based pharmaceutical company. Now Dresslar is the 38-year-old CEO of a software analytics company with plans to move to San Diego, joining the region’s expanding concentration of software analytics companies.

But the Michigan resident is not a typical startup CEO. If anything, he’s a reluctant entrepreneur.

“I kind of liked the corporate life,” Dresslar told me over a breakfast last week at the Cottage in La Jolla. “I don’t really like this startup business, with no real HR.” Don’t get him wrong. “It’s not that I don’t want to be an entrepreneur—I really believe in the business,” Dresslar says. “It’s just that there are aspects of running a small business that are not my cup of tea.”

Aside from yearning for a full-fledged human resources department, there are the frequent the frequent treks across time zones. Dresslar estimates he’s racked up more than 400,000 miles over the past decade, including almost-weekly flights between his home in Ann Arbor and the software development office in La Jolla.

That will probably change in coming months. The company he founded, Torrey Path, is in late-stage due diligence with two venture capital firms. If he gets funding, Dresslar plans to expand the business, which will presumably include someone to handle payroll, benefits, and other pesky HR issues, at his soon-to-be corporate headquarters in La Jolla. Either way, he plans to relocate his family to San Diego after his kids finish school in Ann Arbor. That should eliminate much of his air travel. All of which should enable Dresslar to spend more time on what he’s really interested in, which is information technology and bio-informatics.

Dresslar founded Torrey Path because he saw how to provide complex scientific data to life science companies—along with analytical software tools that customers could use to extract information that would be really useful to them.

Dresslar says he and his immediate family have funded the company so far.

So how did a guy from Michigan come up with a quintessential San Diego name for his company? “We were trying for something not-too-techie sounding that was evocative on a few levels,” he says. “It certainly didn’t take me many visits to fall in love

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.