Paul Bass Photo
Josh Geballe at WNHH FM.
Josh Geballe ushered the DMV into the 21st century. Can he do the same for New Haven’s start-up economy?
He’s ready to give it his best.
Until two months ago, Geballe served as Gov. Ned Lamont’s chief operating officer (aka right-hand man), overseeing daily responses to the Covid-19 pandemic and, not incidentally, finally bringing license renewals online and revamping the seemingly hopeless Department of Motor Vehicles along with a team of other state officials.
Now Geballe has taken on another ambitious task: heading a new department at Yale charged with “supporting and expanding innovation and entrepreneurship across the university and throughout the Greater New Haven region.”
That’s the mission statement of the department, called Yale Ventures. It replaces Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research (OCR) set up in the 1980s to oversee “tech transfer” — helping researchers and profs patent and license their discoveries and turn them into new businesses.
The new Yale Ventures incorporates and expands that mission. It aims to work both within the university and in the broader community to train innovators to start companies, mentor them through the process, seek new corporate funding sources for start-ups, connect local companies as potential partners, help fill New Haven office and lab space, and help entrepreneurs as well as other New Haveners land jobs in the new companies.
Tech start-ups can produce jobs for New Haveners from all walks of life, Geballe (whose formal title at Yale is senior associate provost for entrepreneurship & innovation) stated during a conversation about the new venture Thursday on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program: “The typical biotech start-up is going to have some leadership, they’re going to have some PhDs in white coats doing research. They also have lab techs, and office staff. There’s enormous demand, unmet need for those types of jobs.”
Planting start-up seeds throughout town also makes for a potentially stable, long-term economic strategy.
“It’s a much more robust form of economic growth, when you have many smaller firms that are growing,” Geballe observed.
“Some of them become Alexions or Arvinas that employ hundreds of people. But even then it’s not one massive employer that employs thousands of people, that if their technology shifts or they move overseas, then it’s a devastating effect. We have much more diversification.”
In a sense Geballe’s mission marks a third phase in the evolving town-gown effort to replace the tens of thousands of jobs lost to dying or fleeing manufacturers with a new tech-driven eds-and-meds economy. Phase 1 began in the 1980s with OCR’s creation and the creation of Science Park as a successor to the largely abandoned Winchester rifle complex. Yale President Rick Levin ushered in Phase 2.0 by embracing both OCR and Science Park rather than keeping it at arm’s length and working closely with New Haven’s DeStefano administration on economic development. Those efforts bore fruit, as evidence by the filling up of Science park buildings, 300 George St., 100 College St., and the not-yet-finished 101 College St.
Which gives Geballe and his team a chance to bring the effort to the next level.
An initial step will be the Yale-hosted annual Innovation Summit on May 17 and 18 (details here), which this year will feature more participation by innovators outside Yale’s community, who will have the chance to pitch venture capitalists and network with other new-economy movers and shakers.
Geballe: No danger of "getting bored."
Geballe, who is 47 and grew up in Stony Creek, comes to his new task with a combination of tech experience — including learning business management ropes at IBM, then running a successful software start-up (at the dawn of cloud computing’s rise), and finally diving into government service as Lamont’s COO. He said he can envision staying with his new job for decades, for the rest of his career.
He said Yale Ventures itself feels like a start-up. “We’re moving fast,” he said. “We’re not getting everything perfect. We’ll experiment.”
After two career-sector moves in five years, Geballe was asked how long he envisions staying in his new job.
“Rest of my life,” he responded. “ When you’ve got a university like Yale that’s spending a billion dollars a year on R&D, there’s never going to be an end to the new innovations coming out.
“If you ever get bored doing this work, you’re doing this wrong. “
Click on the video to watch the full conversation with Josh Geballe on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.”