Man with a Vision

With extensive science and business expertise, Steve Bares moving Memphis biotech forward

Memphis Business Journal
September 1, 2006
By Scott Shepard

If it weren't for Steve Bares, you'd have a laser printer at home instead of an ink jet.

Bares today is guiding the creation of the UT-Baptist Research Park, but first he was a chemist who spent the first part of his life safely within the world of academics. Until the day he took a job at Hewlett-Packard and joined a team of people who were expected to succeed where IBM, Kodak and Siemens had all failed. They were told to create an ink jet printer and bring it to market before laser printers became cheap and common.

The problem with everyone else's ink jet was that the ink had to be heated to about 600 degrees before spraying, which changed the chemistry of the ink. The jets would eventually clog and required a cleaning process beyond the patience of a typical person.

The H-P solution: Design a disposable ink jet, integrated with a disposable reservoir, so that about the time the jets clogged it was time to replace the entire unit. When it reached the market in 1985, it established a new industry.

Bares grew up in Silicone Valley in the mid-1970s, when the area was just starting to become Technology Central. Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs was Bares' student instructor in high school, teaching younger students how to repair TVs. One day while shooting hoops in a friend's driveway, Bares found a college chemistry textbook in the garage and decided then and there that his life would be all about figuring things out at the fundamental level.

"I love the science; the problem was that it was all basic research," Bares says. "I didn't even know that it wasn't satisfying until I started working at Hewlett-Packard."

For the first time, Bares was working with people in marketing, finance, product design and legal matters.

"Walking those halls was a humbling experience," he says. "I realized how little I actually knew about business, and how clear it is that it takes so much more than just the technology."

In the late 1980s, Casio, H-P, Texas Instruments and others started selling high-powered calculators and Bares went on to launch Sparcom Corp., which produced dedicated software to run the devices. The goal was a new product every 60 days, but it meant a grueling existence for a man who also wanted time with his young family. Bares sold out to his investors after four years.

"The lesson of a start-up is to take a lot less stock and a lot more cash next time," he says.

Bares was recruited to International Paper when it was hoping to diversify into a dozen novel directions, but eventually it became obvious that IP is, in its soul, a commodity producer. There was no place for Bares.

About that time, J.R. 'Pitt' Hyde was launching GTx, Inc. and considering a strategy to jump-start a biotech industry in Memphis. Suddenly, the Shelby County Commission blew a deal with Baptist Memorial Health Care Corp. to donate the Midtown hospital to The Med. It meant prime real estate adjacent to the University of Tennessee Health Science Center.

But it needed someone who could look down the road 30 years and guide a massive effort to pull together an entire high-tech industry.

"We interviewed quite a few people, but the thing that stood out about Steve was his unique background, with a Ph.D in chemistry and spending most of his career with small start-up technical businesses," Hyde says.

Bares has an infectious optimism, Hyde says, and a way of inviting others to see what's not yet there: The labs and jobs and ultimately the people who will someday benefit from Memphis medical technology.

The business lesson that Bares brings to the job today is an understanding that there must be a process in place. Someday the research park would have labs, for example, but to coax scientists to move to Memphis and use those labs will also depend on offering a work force. To that end, Bares launched a charter school with a concentration on science.

"This is no different from any other business," he says. "You have a goal, you identify problems, you fix them. You execute the plan."

The process Bares is building is one that will identify promising technology at UT, nurture it along and spin it out into new local employers. Memphis, he says, already has most of the raw material with Bioworks filling the gaps.

"There are a lot of places trying to sell biotech, and they aren't getting there," he says.

Steve J. Bares

President & CEO, Memphis Bioworks Foundation

Education: California State-Humboldt, B.S., Chemistry, 1979; Oregon State, Ph.D, Physical Chemistry, 1983, MBA, 1988

Age: 49

Hometown: San Jose, Calif.

Wife: Madge

Children: Audra, Kylen

Hobbies: Golf, racquetball, reading

sshepard@bizjournals.com | 259-1724