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January 1, 2001

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Innovators And Influencers 2001

VC's Goal: Turn Passions Into Reality

Bill Glynn aims to build a technology community

By Eileen Colkin

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top in on Bill Glynn almost any day of the week, and you're guaranteed to find the same thing: a 32-year-old venture capitalist wearing khaki pants and a white shirt with his company's logo on it. That's his daily uniform because he doesn't want to waste time thinking about what to wear. Most likely, he'll be spouting fragmented ideas--and without a doubt, some of those ideas will be directed at two of his passions: creating technology companies as director of the North Carolina venture firm Southeast Interactive Technology Funds and building the Raleigh-Durham area's reputation as a technology hub.

Glynn is enthusiastic about his goals and has strong ideas about how to make them happen. At the firm, which has about $200 million under management, Glynn has been intensely recruiting IT professionals to help direct technology investment efforts.

Bill Glynn David Blivin, Glynn's boss and managing director at Southeast Interactive, says Glynn can connect people and companies before the benefit is obvious. He offers the example of Southeast Interactive's portfolio company, Arsenal Digital Solutions Worldwide Inc., which was working to differentiate its positioning in the storage-utilities market. Glynn forged a technology partnership between Arsenal and the Internet content-management company FileFrenzy, which Arsenal acquired last fall. "The fact that Arsenal has something more than storage turns out to be an advantage to them as the storage-management space has gotten much more competitive," Blivin says.

What also makes Glynn valuable, Blivin adds, is the constant flow of creative ideas. "My job is to try to pick the two or three ideas of the hundred he has every day that are worth spending time on," Blivin says. "That's not a bad problem to have."

FAVORITE CAR :
Ferrari, plus toys, including a four-wheeler

LEAST FAVORITE TOPICS:
Weather and sports

VACATIONS:
None in 12 years

STOCKS TO WATCH:
Archer Daniels Midland, supermarket to the world ("Everyone's gotta eat"); Vical, a viral platform for genetic material transfers

Innovators always talk about thinking outside the box, but Glynn prefers to think outside his business. For five years, he's worked with politicians and business executives to build up the Research Triangle area of Raleigh and Durham, N.C., hoping it will become a region comparable to Silicon Valley. In November, he rode on Midway Airlines' inaugural direct flight from the region's RDU Airport to San Jose, Calif., a route he and others at the Southeast Interactive fund have pushed for years. Also on that flight was a team of economic developers from the Raleigh-Durham area whom Glynn hoped would transfer some of Silicon Valley's infrastructure lessons to their region.

Glynn works with top executives from Research Triangle companies such as Ericsson, Nortel Networks, and SAS Institute to ensure that every aspect of the local economy is appealing to outsiders. "The way I look at it, who in their lifetime will have the opportunity to landscape a technological community?" he asks.

By the end of 2001, Glynn, who compares his personality to Gen. George Patton and his intellect to, well, Albert Einstein, plans to take at least three of his portfolio companies public and to cross the $1 billion threshold for capital under management. Personally, the bachelor would like to lose 15 pounds and buy a log cabin in the woods where he can write three books. That might be tricky, given a work schedule that includes a 12-year run without a vacation. But he's not complaining. "Imagine doing the thing you're most passionate about every single day," he says. "I'm psyched."