out-of-town venture firms continued to invest heavily in many of San Diego’s mid- to later-stage startup companies. With venture capital continuing to flow into the region, some San Diego business leaders questioned whether there was really a dearth of venture capital in San Diego, or even much need for San Diego-based VCs. Their argument, basically, is “if you build it, they will come.” That is, if San Diego’s early stage startups have truly innovative technology, then venture capital will come from far and wide to invest in it.
Titus doesn’t see it that way. “I can only speak personally,” he says, “but when you’re talking about early stage companies, they don’t get done by out-of-town venture capital firms. They just don’t.”
Titus says venture firms want to keep especially close watch on the early stage companies in their portfolio. As a result, he says San Diego entrepreneurs who are seeking Series A venture funding are frequently told by Northern California venture firms that if they want to get funded, “the answer is to move to the Bay Area.”
That sentiment was seconded by Jeremy Glaser, a lawyer and partner in the San Diego office of Mintz Levin whose corporate practice focuses on emerging growth companies and the investors that fund them. Glaser says when he meets an early stage entrepreneur these days, “One of the first questions I get is: ‘Should I be doing this in San Diego or should I be up in the Bay Area?’”
Glaser, who is a member-at-large of the Titus task force, says venture capital for early stage companies is just too hard to find, and the general partners at venture firms simply don’t want to make long-distance investments—even when it’s just 453 miles between San Francisco and San Diego. “I don’t want to get too melodramatic,” Glaser says, “but getting this early stage venture capital is crucial to the tech community in San Diego.”
Glaser says he sees parallels between the goal of the Titus task force and the effort that San Diego’s business leaders mounted in the mid-1990s to recruit Robert Kibble from Paragon Venture Funds in Menlo Park, CA, which established Mission Ventures in San Diego in 1996. “We got community leaders who made a concerted effort to recruit and establish a VC firm in San Diego, and that’s how we got Mission Ventures,” Glaser says. “Some people wrote personal checks to make that happen…I believe we need to get the leaders of this community and who care about San Diego to put their money where their mouth is.”
To Titus, however, the problem of early stage capital is bigger than that.
“If all you did was add one venture firm, that’s still far from helping to jump-start the flow of venture capital in the local economy,” Titus says. “We’d really like to figure out a series of actions that can have a broader impact.”
Titus anticipates focusing San Diego’s task force on a variety of areas, including getting increased federal funding, encouraging investments by family investment groups and individual investors, and recruiting banks and other lenders to get more involved. “This is an effort by a broad section of the community to address this problem from multiple directions,” Titus says.
Peter Shaw, who joined the Titus task force from the San Diego Venture Group, where he is the current president, says he wants to ensure that the task force addresses the lack of capital available to the entrepreneurs who want to start early stage technology companies in San Diego. “Overall, having more money is good, but in terms of where this task force is headed, we want to see that more companies get that first Series A institutional round of funding,” Shaw says.
With just two meetings held so far, Titus says the task force is still focused on generating ideas for the group to pursue. “We’re still in the brainstorming phase of the project,” Titus says. “And if I can get a plug into your article, it would be to ask anyone who has an idea to send me an e-mail.” His e-mail is [email protected]
