For years the nickname “Silicon Beach” has been mentioned as a possible nickname for Wilimgton as it began to emerge as a startup hub for tech and life science companies. “I don’t love the Silicon Beach moniker,’ says longtime tech entrepreneur Tom Looney. But in the second part of our in-depth interview about Wilmington’s continuing growth ahead of this week’s Cucalorus festival, he points out that reminders about ocean access “and so much more” can be helpful, especially in recruiting. (Part one is available online.

  • What’s your reaction to the nickname Silicon Beach?

When visitors to Wilmington head back to the more crowded roads and higher cost of living in major metros like Raleigh and Charlotte we like to imagine how long it takes someone before they stop, turn back to Wrightsville Beach, or Mayfair, Midtown, or Downtown and declare, “I’m staying!”

Honestly, we see an awful lot of that. It has happened in waves.

First it was a lot of traded sector employees working for topline firms, for example pharmaceutical sales reps; IBM professional services and support professionals; or tech sector guys like me (the whole time I worked for Microsoft as Industry Director of Homeland Security and Public Safety industry unit, I lived here). The next round was the layering in of the supportive infrastructure for an innovation economy to take root.

We landed a number of guys in the decade 2000-2009 that had tremendous backgrounds in either leading or serving as senior execs in some iconic startups that did very well.

To me, the third wave was the investments by UNCW (creating the CIE) and Brett Martin at Castle Branch (creating TekMountain) brought the organized first layer of physical infrastructure that’s needed. Diane Durance (CIE) and Sean Ahlum at TekMountain maintain a constant flow of speakers, investors, etc. from within and outside of Wilmington coming to inspire and educate the startup community here.

Jim Roberts was the first CIE Director, and he has continued to evangelize Wilmington’s tech startup sector, and his statewide relationships in Raleigh and Charlotte are important…he brings people to Wilmington, and brings Wilmington people to Raleigh’s innovation sector.

I don’t love the “Silicon Beach” moniker, but we have to remind people that we’re at the beach and so, so much more. GE and Corning are among the leaders of the advanced manufacturing, “Digital Industrial” transformation in that sector. And they have thousands of quality, educated workers here. So do several other high quality manufacturers. The innovation-led economic development literature points to advanced manufacturing as part of a regional innovation-hub economy.

Our door is OPEN to those types of firms.

You know, in Silicon Valley it was once defined by latitude-longitude. But then with growth, the physical boundaries slipped in four directions. Silicon Valley is more an aspirational place, not too strictly defined as to where it starts and ends.

Sometimes, I think “The Triangle” could wake up one day and realize. “Hey, Wilmington is the easternmost edge of our Triangle!” And that wouldn’t be so bad as far as I’m concerned.

For now, I think we should encourage more interactions by visitors to Wilmington, especially from the Triangle, to come early and leave late, and work out of some “Eastern Edge” workspaces. It’s the collision of people and ideas in these informal workspaces that can lead to magic happening. We’re now able to recruit and train a high quality employee at our fast growth tech firms both for sales/business development and for developers/tech support.

Tobin Geatz and Brendan Collins are running an interesting business at Seahawk Innovation. They have simultaneously created several traded sector businesses with impressive patented technologies, and they are starting to mature and getting closer to breakout’s.

  • The PPD HQ on the waterfront is quite a testament to the growth of Wilmington. With the growth of nCino and the new LiveOak startup, what’s the future appear to hold?

I started working in the DC Metro tech hotbed, Tyson’s Corner, VA, in 1983. I was too young and dumb to realize it immediately, but then I witnessed all the economic forces that occur within fast-growing industry clusters, and the density in brings within the tech sector in this case, and then, the multiplier effect it has across every other part of the regional economy.

In fact, the most jobs the tech industry creates are NOT in the tech sector. Because every traded sector innovation jobs has been estimated to created up to five additional jobs across the entire economy. And most of those are in non-tech jobs in the non-traded, local economy side.

I really think Wilmington is in the infancy of being a major regional economy of this century, and the momentum has swung nicely to my thesis. So long as leadership remains open-minded, data driven and committed to preserving and enhancing what are already our key economic growth factors, we should be a rising star in the state of NC’s economy for a long time.

Consider this: Live Oak founder Chip Mahan has said many times that the FinTech firms like his are disrupting traditional retail banking. Wilmington’s FinTech cluster could become the strongest in the state! And then as the whole world moves to digital banking, Wilmington could supplant Charlotte as the “banking capital” title that the Queen City has celebrated for a couple of decades now.

Crazier things have happened. And the vision and execution track record of those Live Oak and nCino guys is very impressive. They know how to scale these enterprise, mission-critical businesses.

  • Your own experience in technology is quite extensive. Based on those experiences, what is Wilmington doing correctly to nurture tech? What do its leaders need to be doing more in what areas to keep the growth going?

I think many of the things I’ve pointed out here reflect a commitment by many important parts of the innovation sector to assume leadership of Wilmington’s economic identity. Certainly, the most important way to measure success is when companies breakout, and hit the famed “hockey stick” growth levels in revenues that lead to major increases in headcount. I’m sure our weaknesses mostly reflect the reality in most every region in the country.

The political and local business people generally run the politics and economic development. Traded sector leaders rarely serve in these roles, because, well they aren’t typically in town all the time. Our city council and county commissioners give a lot of their time to serve in office. They are often lawyers, real estate guys, etc. They fall into the trap of following the lead of these local economy honchos, because they are the ones that typically fund their campaigns. Increasingly now, we see national and state party money flowing into local elections. And that makes things even more complicated. Because it’s likely that the laggards in the polluter industrial complex is going to outspend the hyper-growth visionaries and early-movers in the tech sector.

Wilmington is improving, in part because we have more people understanding the fact that growth in the traded sector includes large number of innovation services jobs. And that the digital industrial incumbents, and prospective new projects, are changing at a rapid pace, and the mythical blue-collar manufacturing jobs, which peaked in 1980 in terms of jobs, is NOT ever going to “come back.” Innovation, as demonstrated by Corning and GE, never takes a holiday. I still believe that there is a market failure, in terms of how taxpayer money is allocated to economic development.

The last couple of deals excitedly announced by our old-school econ dev group have been duds. But it’s not up to them to turn down money awarded to them every year by the county, sole-source, with no apparent sense of accountability, transparency, or accomplishment. It’s actually up to the county leadership to look at the data and agree with the regions we are competing against to make continued progress in the innovation-led economy.

That the best way to create better paying jobs for our lesser educated, lesser skilled workers is to first, expand the traded innovation sector’s footprint. Because each one of those jobs creates five new jobs, and importantly, the majority are non-tech jobs. And then, the next step is to up-skill ALL our residents. Kids shouldn’t drop out of high school, or stop with a high school degree or GED. That’s not enough to break out from minimum wage. So, that’s step one. Step two is to upskill into the jobs where we have shortages here, and around the country: plumbers, electricians, renewable energy technicians (wind, solar); nursing; construction etc. Wilmington has full-employment and historic low unemployment rates.

For this to continue, we should invest in the places that give us the best chance of growing our traded sector. Period. We will always have cronyism is laggard sectors and the money and political influence there is strong. But they lack ideas, and they are limited in making a data driven analysis as to their side of the debate. Steve Jobs always wanted a healthy competition of ideas, before striking on the best path.  He always said, “It’s OK for a conversation to be an argument.”

That’s how the human race goes from good to great. And I think we’re turning the corner here in Wilmington. Because WHEN the innovation-led economic strategy wins, then everyone here wins. Everyone!

And so, there is no doubt about it, Wilmington will be a winner!