The San Diego Venture Group is announcing a change in command.
Mike Krenn, a veteran San Diego marketing and business development executive, is succeeding Dave Titus as president of the nonprofit business organization, which has worked in recent years to inject new energy to the startup ecosystem in San Diego.
Krenn has worked for various law firms in San Diego. He was most recently at Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves, & Savitch, overseeing initiatives that included managing LaunchPad, an in-house program to help startup teams prepare to raise investment capital. He begins his new job today—just in time for the venture group’s annual summer social beer bash, set for this afternoon at the Scripps Seaside Forum in La Jolla.
With about 800 individual and corporate members, the venture group says its primary mission is fostering relationships and ideas to form, fund, and build new ventures. Titus, who was a co-founder of San Diego’s Windward Ventures, became the venture group’s first full-time president in 2011, and has been mostly focused on growing and supporting the local community of tech startups, which has been ailing.
There are typically more venture investments in life sciences startups than in tech startups in San Diego each quarter. The density of life sciences companies based here is also greater; there are more biotech innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors working through the startup cycle of founding, growing, and selling their companies.
Under Titus, the venture group’s annual venture summit has become a showcase for local “Cool Companies.” The group also has worked to increase venture investing in San Diego by bringing out-of-town venture firms like Arizona’s Grayhawk Capital, Oakland, CA-based Claremont Creek Ventures, and Philadelphia’s Susquehana Growth Equity to meet local tech entrepreneurs through a new “Venture Link” program.
Before 2011, the venture group’s principal activity was hosting monthly breakfast meetings that featured talks by VCs, consultants, and others. While the venture group continues to hold 11 breakfast meetings a year, Titus said he’s added new members to
