Bishop is vice president at Biosite, the San Diego-based subsidiary of Inverness Medical Innovations. His teammates are John Hughes, an R&D director at Invitrogen in nearby Carlsbad, and Patrick Finn, lately of Invitrogen and now with a Boston-area life sciences company. Rounding out the foursome is Clark Renner, a local golf pro.

 

Known as Team Invitrogen, these guys are nonstop wisecrackers. But beneath the Rat Pack banter, the foursome is deadly serious about golf. Team Invitrogen has won the tournament two years running and Bishop’s drive has positioned it for a three-peat. “There’s first place, and there’s the first best loser, and I can tell you none of us want to be that,” Hughes says solemnly.

 

Finn’s up next. He’s 6-foot-4 and has a powerful swing. He takes off his cap and scratches his head as he casts a long look down the fairway. Renner wipes his iron clean while Hughes fidgets with a range finder. “I think I’ve got one good swing left in me,” Finn says. He isn’t kidding. The ball sails.

 

The Biotech Golf Network, or BGN, is a group of San Diego life sciences professionals and suppliers who get together once a month to play 18 holes and talk shop, pitch product, or schmooze a potential business partner, boss, client, or employee. The membership list is 300. Monthly outings bring out a few dozen players at courses ranging from budget to swanky. The annual tournament attracts 150. Skill levels vary. Some BGN members barely know the business end of a 9 iron, but many are serious players. Finn’s handicap is scratch. Renner played in the 2000 U.S. Open but was bested by a younger golfer named Tiger Woods.

 

As a biotech hub, San Diego ranks third behind the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston-Cambridge. As a slice of heaven for biotech golfers, “America’s finest city”—blessed with year-round sunshine and lush courses with beautiful natural backdrops—may be second to none.

 

Marquee names like Pfizer, The Scripps Research Institute, Burnham Institute for Medical Research, Johnson Therapeutic, and the Salk Institute are clustered around scenic Torrey Pines, one of Southern California’s premier courses and host of the 2008 U.S. Open. Even employees in the smaller science-biotech community of Mira Mesa-Sorrento Valley are close enough to Torrey Pines to get in nine holes in the morning and punch in on time.

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.

Neither Scott nor Bibbs felt guilty about their golf outings. “It was a good opportunity for Jeff and me to break away from the rest of the team and have strategy sessions about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to do,” Scott says. “Golf is great for that.” It was during one of those afternoons at The Meadows that Scott and Bibbs struck upon the business model that would set Pharmatek apart from the CRO pack.

 

As they walked from one fairway to the next, the two partners agreed to borrow a chapter from the Starbucks playbook. Pharmatek would focus on quality and speed: direct client-scientist communication, no project managers running interference, and easy-to-decipher invoices. It was exactly what San Diego’s growing community of small and virtual biotechs—funded by VCs interested in getting drugs to the clinic as efficiently as possible—needed but weren’t getting.

 

Scott and Bibbs were putting their time on the links to good use. Still, Scott wondered if there wasn’t some way to make it at least seem more like work. Scott scoured his email list for biotech contacts and came up with 28 names. He invited each to a friendly round of golf and networking. Dividing by four, he scheduled seven tee times at The Meadows.

 

Only six players showed up. Adding insult to injury, The Meadows charged Scott $1,870 for five unused tee times.

 

As a golfer and businessman, Scott knew the value of perseverance. He continued to send out monthly invites. The turnout improved. At the same time, things were looking up for Pharmatek. Scott and Bibbs had gotten in at just the right time. “We were the only chemical development group in town,” Scott says. “That really helped us a lot.” The BGN was good for business, too. One afternoon a month, Scott was the man. “I met tons of people,” Scott says.

 

In 2002, Scott and Bibbs offered to buy out their investors at 17 percent interest. They had no takers. Today, Pharmatek has 75 employees and more than 100 clients. The company is involved in more than 150 projects, all of which “have interesting applications and significant markets,” Scott says.

 

Until this year, the BGN was missing one thing—a charity. Scott had always told himself that the right cause eventually would reveal itself. That happened in late October 2007, when parched Southern California exploded in flames. The tournament raised $11,050 for badly needed renovations at Maderas Golf Club’s neighborhood firehouse, Rancho Bernardo Fire Station 33. Remarkably, Maderas was mostly unscathed by the wildfires. Flames halted at the edge of the well-irrigated course.

 

Back on the 18th hole green at the BGN tournament, Team Invitrogen birdies to take the tournament with a 10-under-par 62. After the awards ceremony that evening, Bishop, Hughes, Finn, and Renner exchange slaps on the back and head back to their cars clutching eight-inch, gold-plated cups. Finn mumbles under his breath that he’s ready to do it all again the next day. Anyone for a round of golf?