Little wonder that large publicly traded companies like Callaway and TaylorMade call San Diego home. In fact, according to the San Diego Business Journal, America’s eighth-largest city is the “epicenter of the golf industry” due to its heavy concentration of
golf companies.

 

Given golf’s high profile in San Diego, the links are the place to see and be seen. Invitrogen, Gen-Probe, and ResMed will sponsor corporate tents this June at the U.S. Open. A few years ago, ResMed CEO Peter Farrell played alongside Vijay Singh in the Buick Pro-Am at Torrey Pines’ grueling South Course. On the 18th hole, Farrell holed his shot out of a greenside bunker for birdie, causing Singh, whose back had been turned, to remark, “Peter, I missed that; could you please
do it again!”

 

Everybody knows that deals are made on the golf course. So are relationships. Ian Wisenberg is senior vice president of business development and CFO at BIOCOM, the San Diego-based trade association for the biotech community. Wisenberg matches biotech people with venture capitalists, IP attorneys, or prospective employees. He routinely uses a round of golf as a sort of personality test.

 

“Ethics and morals, abilities and attitudes, and temperaments—that all comes out on the golf course. You can size someone up pretty quickly.” Standard gauges like handicap are all irrelevant, Wisenberg adds. “It’s how you play the game in a group.”

 

The BGN was started by Tim Scott, president of Pharmatek, a San Diego-based chemical development company. Pharmatek and BGN’s stories are so intertwined that it’s hard to tell where one stops and the
other starts.

 

In the 1990s, Scott met Jeff Bibbs at Amylin Pharmaceuticals in San Diego. The two hit it off. Both were on the uphill side of 40, avid golfers, and had young sons who played baseball. Moreover, they had both worked at large contract research organizations (CROs) and came away thinking such companies were mostly slow and inefficient.

 

In 1999, Scott and Bibbs decided to start their own CRO. Scott would handle the business side, Bibbs the science. Neither had startup money—but they did have parents. After listening to a 30-second pitch, during which they had almost no idea what their sons were talking about, Loren and Paula Scott and Ken and Jackie Bibbs wrote checks for sizeable amounts of money, most of which they never expected to see again.

 

Pharmatek launched in spring 1999 in a small Sorrento Valley office with a roll-up garage door that was hoisted open for TGIF barbecues. Business was slow those first couple of years. When Scott ran out of doors to knock on, he and Bibbs would duck out for a round of golf. Their regular course, The Meadows Del Mar (now The Grand Golf Club), was a few miles north of the office. Their golf clubs, then and now, were never farther than the trunk of the car.