News that DuPont was moving its headquarters to the Chestnut Run campus brought back memories of a meeting I attended while working as editor of the Delaware Business Review.
Lawyers, accountants and other professionals were itching to bring some of the energy of the Route 202 corridor north of the state line to northern Delaware. The vibrancy of that area dates back to the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Some of the hopes in that room were dashed as presenters noted that DuPont Co. and others did not cotton to such things.
Granted, DuPont had helped spawn a number of start-ups, the most notable being W.L. Gore, a company driven by its founder’s distaste for the stifling corporate structure of companies like DuPont and its ability to leverage its fiber technology into a host of areas.
Gore, meanwhile, added manufacturing and R&D jobs in neighboring Cecil County, perhaps in response to DuPont operating massive sites in the Newark area and by some accounts due to not in my backyard concerns from residents. Gore, while owning land in Delaware, has never added many jobs in the state in recent decades.
VCs persisted and had a number of successes, but the action remained to the north, driven by pharmaceutical and technology start-ups. At the time, DuPont employed about 25,000 and heavily influenced daily life in the state. Not that long ago, DuPont family interests sold the News Journal to fast-growing Gannett, which paid a hefty price at the time.
It operated a diverse set of businesses that included coal and oil companies and a sizable pharmaceutical and medical equipment operation. The head count is now less than 8,000, depending on how you add in outsourced positions.
Our struggling publication, the Delaware Business Review, wrote lots of nice stories about the company and its spin-offs ICI and Hercules, but any advertising money that fell off the table went elsewhere.
That had nothing to do with DuPont. The Business Review was not part of the “club” that had surfaced elsewhere when the start-up community embraced business journals that tracked their ups and downs.
At the time, DuPont’s Delaware operations, packed with administrative staff, had not felt the threat of a changing global economy. One heard a lot of grumbling in the ranks about an absent-minded slow-moving Uncle Duppie that had not come up with the next nylon, despite an army of researchers.
There were even gripes about the company spending too much on Kevlar, the lightweight protective material that has saved many lives and made its way into a number of industries. A few years later, things changed and a wave of downsizings and restructurings that continue to this day sent many into early retirement or to careers elsewhere.
DuPont would never be the same and it was inevitable that the company would continue to shed mature businesses while placing its bets on faster growing areas such as agribusiness, food ingredients and safety.
It made a few, perhaps many mistakes, failing to put promising businesses in the hands of entrepreneurs. It retained others, a few that show promise and might have moved to greater heights under a different mindset. Along the way, the entrepreneurial fires that could have brought us another DuPont have been lacking.
MBNA came along to cushion the blow to thge economy and for a time in the 1990s, offered six-figure salaries to even moderately motivated liberal arts grads. There was also First USA, an entrepreneurially driven company that eventually cashed out with a sale to BankOne (later Chase).
Along the way, credit cards changed, becoming a commodity business driven by information technology. MBNA ended up being acquired by Bank of America, which has since cut thousands of jobs, many at the sprawling former headquarters of the credit card giant in downtown.
Since that time, the entrepreneurial community has become more active. A few vibrant companies have emerged, the most recent example being computer monitoring company SevOne.
It would take a lot of space to mention all the work taking place, including the Horn program at the University of Delaware. the LOMA area in downtown and a start-up center in the Hercules Building and the Delaware Technology Park, just to name a few.
But much more needs to be done in terms of tax and other policies to increase the odds that a few more SevOnes will emerge and balance out the decline of corporate giants.
There is also the issue of a struggling city with a sickeningly high homicide rate, and a licensing and inspection bureaucracy that makes life difficult for many businesses. That’s a topic for another day. For now, it is time to focus on building home-grown companies and providing an environment for those companies looking to relocate in the region.
Events like the upcoming Idea Challenge (see front page story) are a way to build that community and get us out from under the nostalgia that holds us back.
