Catalyst at
work
David Chen pushes Oregon forward with his own brash style.
By Christina
Williams
The hour is rounding toward 9 a.m., and David Chen is getting
warmed up.
He’s leaned forward at the small round table tucked into
the corner of a cluttered faculty office on the Oregon State
University campus in Corvallis. His black-rimmed eyeglasses sit
folded in front of him next to his well-worn Nokia phone. He
listens, makes spare notes into a hardback composition book and
bends his head over few paragraphs of text and a diagram
outlining the functions of a futuristic small-scale nuclear
reactor handed to him a few minutes before.
Then the questions begin.
“Is it rechargeable?”
“How revolutionary is it? Are there other competing
designs?”
“I’m not struggling with the economics, but what
the hell’s the vehicle for this?”
It’s this last question that everyone around the table
wants to know the answer to.
José Reyes, head of the Department of Nuclear
Engineering at Oregon State University, does his best to answer
Chen’s questions. The topic of the hour is Reyes’
design of a small-scale nuclear power generator and its
potential as a money-making vehicle for speculative investors
such as Chen.
But Chen, whose specialty is investing in high-tech companies,
has no interest in putting money into nuclear power. He’s
here to cut through the b.s. and offer some free, real-world
advice. He’s here to tell Reyes and OSU engineering dean
Ron Adams what investors are thinking when they hear it will
take $100 million to get a prototype of this design up and
running (answer: “ick”). He’s here to ask the
questions that will lay bare the essential value in the
technology and lead the group to a course of action.
He’s here, as he puts it, “as a friend of the
family.” And he’s here, as Adams puts it, because:
“You’re one of the best strategy guys I
know.”
These days, everybody wants a piece of David Chen.
A maestro of myriad self-interests, Chen has proven himself
adept at convincing Oregonians by the roomful that it’s
OK to be, in his words, naked — to admit underdog
status and charge forward with a big idea. Once he’s done
that, he applies his own kind of prickly catalytic energy to
pull it all together. His handiwork is leaving an imprint on
the state’s economy that will be visible for years to
come.
As chairman of the board of the Oregon Nanoscience and
Microtechnology Institute (ONAMI), Chen is an important
strategic driver behind the state’s biggest bet to date
on the so-called innovation economy. He’s also the
governor-appointed chairman of the nascent Oregon Innovation
Council, an organization set up last year by the Oregon
Legislature and charged with directing the state’s future
bets on emerging industries. He also leads the Oregon
Entrepreneurs Forum’s board of directors this year, was
appointed in December to the board of directors for the
Portland branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco
and serves on the advisory committee of the year-old Oregon
Investment Fund.
Despite the fact that he’s smack in the middle of some
pretty ambitious efforts to bring big changes to the state,
Chen turns up his palms, deflects the credit and says
he’s just a citizen. He also says his personal idea of
hell is a version of the movie Groundhog Day in which the same
meeting is lived over and over. He’s virtually allergic
to wasting time.
Those who know the 46-year-old Chen use words such as focused,
driven, private, impatient and wickedly smart to describe him.
He tramps around his office in stocking feet, types e-mails
devoid of capital letters and doesn’t mince words. He
favors jeans, black shirts and soft-soled suede boots. He can
come across as fidgety and boyish or brusque and stoic. But
when he speaks, it’s with pure authority: a low, measured
voice and a vocabulary that sometimes sends others scrambling
for the dictionary (as in orthogonal: of or related to a matrix
whose transpose equals its reverse).
His intensity can make others squirm, and while Chen has
charm, his style is often orthogonal to the typical Oregonian
approach: polite, docile and, above all, nice.
“He’s not one to pad with diplomatic niceties what
his thoughts are,” says Ron Paul, who recruited Chen to
serve on the board of directors of his effort to get a
year-round public market established in Portland.
“We all have our strengths and weaknesses,” says
Don Krahmer, lawyer with Schwabe Williamson & Wyatt,
longtime volunteer on economic development initiatives and one
of Chen’s fans. “I would never ask Dave Chen to
soften his high-tech Silicon Valley style. He’s not
afraid to speak his mind.”
Beyond a resume-busting list of extracurricular
responsibilities, his demanding job as partner at venture
capital firm OVP Venture Partners gives Chen a front-row seat
on emerging high-tech companies in the Pacific Northwest. His
goal as a venture capitalist is to invest in the ones that will
grow the fastest, perform the best and make the most money for
his firm and its investors.
OVP, with offices in Portland and Kirkland, Wash., manages
some $500 million and receives regular investments from the
Oregon State Treasury, the most recent being $50 million in
OVP’s seventh fund approved by the Oregon Investment
Council in March. Chen is one of six investing partners at OVP
and sits on the board of Portland-area startups Ambric and
UXComm, along with Intelligent Results of Bellevue, Wash.
“My top priority is my day job: making good deals and
managing the portfolio,” Chen says. “The world I
know best is the startup world.”
His work in the public sector comes bundled with this startup
experience. “What I’m most vocal about is that as a
startup you admit that you’re a little guy,” he
says. “To admit that you’re not on top is very
freeing.”
Chen’s approach is a tightly wound combination of
underdog vulnerability and the chutzpah to say that if just the
right niches are exploited, Oregon can invent its way into a
leadership position in the global economy.
“I WOULD LIKE YOU TO CONVINCE ME that this is absolutely
unique,” says Chen. “I’m OK with a few holes,
but I want a revolution that I can de-risk.”
He’s a few hours into his morning at OSU. The meeting
rooms have changed with the topics, revolving from nuclear
power to micro-nano laminates to the present session on
biodiesel. In this meeting his posture is different. The
sleeves of his black turtleneck have been nudged up, his suede
coat is slung across the chair beside him. He’s bouncing
his knee to the time of his flickering thoughts. He’s
defining next steps. He’s talking about getting the
technology, a microchannel reactor for the processing of
biodiesel, ready to go, about getting industry partners
involved, about OVP taking a quarter-million-dollar flier on
the idea. He’s talking about charging forward.
“The two things I want to get out of a next meeting with
you are: where the technology is and where the gaps are,”
Chen says. “I also need a high-level business plan.
Almost a white paper. What has to be done to get from here to
there?”
“We’ve got that,” offers Kevin Drost, an
associate professor of mechanical engineering and co-director
of OSU’s microtechnology-based energy and chemical
systems initiative. He adds, “A million would get us to a
functioning version and debugged fabrication point.”
Chen bobs his head as Drost speaks. “I think we want to
prove pretty quickly that there’s a there there,” he
replies.
For Chen, this technology, which has its roots in ONAMI
research, offers a glimmer of the next big thing and a
potential investment for OVP. Sure, biodiesel doesn’t fit
in with the firm’s current portfolio of semiconductor
technology companies, digital imaging plays and life
science-related startups, but Chen sees it as a chance to get a
foothold in the energy market — not that OVP would ever
invest in a biodiesel plant.
“There’s some opportunity to be Levi
Strauss,” Chen says, “selling pickaxes and jeans to
the pioneers. And leaving the big stuff to someone
else.”
He’s got a nose for such opportunities and tends to
follow it, even when he doesn’t know exactly what the end
result is going to look like. “Don’t rush the
structure” is one of Chen’s catch phrases.
It’s moving forward that counts, and he’s quick to
point out that when the idea that became ONAMI began to
coalesce, those involved started working toward the goal of
landing a federal research center before they knew what it
would actually look like.
It’s the same notion that guided Chen late last year as
he and Oregon Innovation Council co-chair Stuart Cohen, CEO of
Open Source Development Lab in Beaverton, set up the structure
for how the council would work. Burning through a lot of
late-night e-mails, they established a subcommittee structure,
organizing groups around the different public policy areas the
council is focusing on — the supply of and demand for
investment capital, areas ripe for more signature research
centers and industry cluster development.
“You take your best shot at structures,” Chen
says. “There’s a lot of ambiguity. I’m
reasonably comfortable with that.”
In other words, Chen is OK being naked.
He uses nakedness to describe the feeling when you’re
starting something from scratch. And despite the Oregonian
penchant for consensus, Chen doesn’t lose any sleep when
he’s unable to convince others to come along with
him.
“If you’re driving consensus, you’re trying
to convince people to be naked with you. They’re telling
you that the emperor has no clothes, but you already know
that,” he says. “If your focus is consensus and
approval, you’ll never get there. You’re not trying
to turn a blind eye to criticism, you’re just trying to
get some traction.”
WHEN HE GOT OFF THE PLANE AT PDX a few months back,
OSU’s Ron Adams found Chen, fresh off the same flight,
hunkered down in the gate’s waiting area, tapping away on
the keys of his IBM ThinkPad.
Adams stopped to chat and hit up Chen for some of his time on
his next Corvallis trip. Before he turned to go, he remembers
teasing him: “What are you going to do, stay at the
airport all night?”
Chen’s reply: “No, I’m going to finish my
e-mail so I can go home and have dinner with my
family.”
For all his work leading volunteer armies and all the time
spent in his day job sniffing out the next new moneymaking
technologies, Chen is a family man who cooks dinner most
nights. And in all the spare time he can scrape together, he
co-owns and helps manage a winery that turns out small amounts
of award-winning pinot noir.
Chen was born in Taiwan but his family moved to the United
States when he was a baby. He got a pre-med degree from the
University of California-Berkeley, but a part-time job at tech
manufacturer Solectron during the dawn of the PC era hooked him
on the industry. He later got a master’s degree at
Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management
and landed in Oregon in 1989 when he took the top marketing job
at Mentor Graphics. In 1993 he co-founded the Ascent Group, a
high-tech consulting firm. In 2000 he joined the ranks of
OVP.
Along the way Chen met and married Jill Price, a dentist,
member of the OHSU Foundation board and Chen’s second
wife. The pair have two sons, one 4, one almost 2, and a
full-time nanny who helps them maintain their careers and their
sanity.
It’s hard to imagine Chen finding the time to scout out
and buy a 72-acre orchard north of Gaston, plow under the old
crops, plant pinot noir vines, harvest the first grapes in 1999
and create a small winemaking operation. But with partner Monte
Pitt, a friend from b-school, that’s exactly what Chen
has done. In November, Patton Valley’s 2002 pinot noir
made a Wall Street
Journal list of 10 best Oregon pinots.
He describes a habit he developed of scheduling work calls
during harvest that kept him from immersing himself in what he
calls the “raw joy” of his vintner identity.
It’s a habit he broke last fall. “Last year,”
he says, “I granted myself permission to enjoy
it.”
A GENERIC DOWNTOWN PORTLAND CONFERENCE ROOM was the site of an
April 16, 2002, gathering that set the course for what became
ONAMI, a collaborative effort to get Oregon on the map for
nanotechnology research.
|
David Chen’s top priority is his day job, where
he’s on the phone and in meetings about
OVP’s portfolio. But he also spends an inordinate
amount of time “making the pie bigger,”
applying his energy to projects and organizations out to
improve the economic picture.
|
Chen singles out the meeting he pulled together, which he calls
a show-and-tell for Oregon’s Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden,
as a turning point. At the time, Wyden was writing the 21st
Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act, designed
to boost nanotechnology research in the United States. He asked
Chen for help in articulating Oregon’s assets in the
field.
Some 50 academics, business leaders and a handful of
politicians bundled into the room, ate boxed lunches and sat
through the 90-minute agenda, a series of short presentations
describing a particular expertise held by an entity in Oregon
— be it FEI Corp., Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Pacific
Northwest National Laboratory or one of the universities
— in the wide area of nanotechnology.
The goal was pretty simple: make it clear to the senator that
the science he was championing on a national level was thriving
in his home state, worthy of his advocacy, and worthy of
national attention and federal research money.
Along with everyone else in the room that day, Chen’s
self interest was at play. It still is. To make money for OVP,
he needs a fertile field of deals. A federally funded research
center helps that cause. So will the big ideas generated by the
Oregon Innovation Council. And poking around the halls of
Oregon’s universities looking for revolutions to de-risk
doesn’t hurt his cause either.
The April 2002 show-and-tell gambit was successful.
Fast-forward two years to the official ONAMI launch ceremony in
May 2004 and listen to Wyden deliver the following line to
cheers from the jubilant audience: “It’s pretty
obvious that nano rocks in Oregon!”
Skip ahead to the present and find ONAMI ahead of schedule in
achieving its goal of winning a federal research center. An $8
million federal commitment is likely to be passed by Congress
this year that will charge the institute with studying thermal
management and portable power for the U.S. Army. Other research
awards are in the works.
“Dave is always thinking things months or years before
other people do,” says Skip Rung, ONAMI’s executive
director. “He was very excited about nanotechnology in
2002. Frankly, I couldn’t have defined it then. But, he
said, ‘I’m going to put energy into
this.’”
Chen is the first person to tell you that ONAMI wasn’t
his idea. In fact, he’s frequently building up the other
early organizers as the real pioneers. As in: “Skip Rung
is truly the unsung hero of this whole damn thing.”
But when Chen got involved, he stepped into a role that
he’s become known for: the catalyst, the guy who pushes
people to create. It’s the reputation that has made him a
sought-after presence on boards and committees of all
descriptions.
In many ways, ONAMI was the ultimate startup for Chen. He had
his eye on the end result — a federally funded research
center — and made sure everyone else did, too.
“That’s where the creative tension came in,”
Chen says. “It wasn’t about getting it right. It
was about getting it.”
It took two years before ONAMI had a there there, another two
before any formal structure caught up with it. Along the way,
there were naysayers. But Chen continued to see an emperor
fully clothed.
Have an opinion?
feedback@oregonbusiness.com
www.oregonbusiness.com/leadership/
Join the discussion about
leadership. Send feedback to
leadership@oregonbusiness.com.
