Tim Wollaeger Interview – October 9, 1996
WOLLAEGER: I went to Yale University and majored in economics. Then I was in the U.S. Navy and went through officer’s candidate school, and then I went to Stanford Business School, an MBA at Stanford. I went to work for Ampex. They invented videotape recording, instant replay, that kind of thing. I was there a little over a year. I usually don’t put Ampex on my resume.
JONES: At any point during these years, did you have any inkling that you’d be working someday in venture capital?
WOLLAEGER: I had never heard of venture capitalists until I got to Hybritech. I didn’t know they existed. Let me give you an anecdote here, and then I’ll go on to tell you something about how I got here. John Wilkerson, who is a marketing consultant out of New York, had a dinner about two years ago for twenty-five people here in San Diego who he felt had been part of this entrepreneurial activity, and he had a questionnaire that he wanted to hand out to people. Quite frankly, I can’t remember what the questions were, but I happened to be sitting next to him at the dinner table, and he said, ‘Read my questionnaire,’ and I suggested two other questions. I said, ‘I’d like you to ask the people at this table how many of them have had parents who graduated from college and how many of them have had parents who haven’t graduated from high school.’ OK, out of twenty-five people there, we only had one person who had both parents graduate from college, and we had four people who had parents that hadn’t graduated from high school. Now, I think one of the things that happens in this sort of entrepreneurial field is that you get a group of people, and it’s not necessarily a direct correlation to intelligence or anything, in fact, I was talking to some people at a business school about the aptitude tests they use for letting people in, and they were saying that they were proud that it had gone up, and I said, ‘Well, what does it correlate with in terms of business success?’ And they said, ‘Well, actually, it doesn’t,’ and after a while, it gets so high that it has a negative correlation. And I said, ‘I think the thing that is hard about letting people into business school is that you’re trying to find people who will do well after school, and not necessarily people who will do well at the school.’ They said that they have found that the greatest indicator of success for people graduating from business school is people who have made some money by the time they were thirteen years old. So, I was probably in that category of people who did not have fantastic scores, but I had made some money by the time I was thirteen. My father was, to give it a loose definition, what you might call a successful entrepreneur. My father started out as a blue collar worker in a printing plant, and he actually had something to do with inventing a process or some segment of a process for printing on aluminum foil. He made a deal with his employer that he would get some royalty on anything he could put together and he ended up designing the Miller High Life beer label on aluminum foil and selling it to the Miller Brewery. And over a period of time, the burden got to be such on his company that they ended up giving him stock instead of cash, and over a period of twenty-five years or so, he ended up being a major shareholder in this company. He went from blue-collar to running the company. And my father, having done very well financially, was very oriented toward, ‘Go to college. Go to college,’ that type of thing. I went to what I consider a very good university, and I was propelled there mainly by athletic success. I had no particular ambition. I was a pretty good athlete, getting pushed along because of that. Track and swimming were my best sports, although I didn’t succeed at the college level. I was very good at the state level in high school. And then, when I was a senior in college, the Dean called you in, and sort of said, ‘What are you going to do when you graduate?’ And I said, ‘I think I’m going to business school.’ Now, the reason I said that was I hadn’t taken any science and I had no interest in being a doctor. I’m somewhat dyslexic, I’m not a great reader, I’m a very slow reader, I have problems in that area, I spell horribly, so I wasn’t going to go to law school. I didn’t take courses that required a lot of reading. I tended to try to do quantitative types of things. But he looked at my grades and said, ‘You haven’t done that badly, you don’t have to go to business school.’ Maybe that was an academic bias against business or something. My thought about business school was that, having been at Yale, 85% of your class was going to end up in graduate school, so I thought, well, I can probably do that. I remember arriving at Stanford, having grown up in a family that was fairly well to do, but not terribly broad. I mean, my father made beer labels in Milwaukee, did it my whole life. And I remember going to a dinner at the Stanford business school the Saturday before we started classes, hosted by second year students.
END OF INTERVIEW