San Diego Magazine / November 2010 / Plus One: Neil Senturia & Barbara Bry

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Plus One: Neil Senturia & Barbara Bry

Talking with San Diego’s interesting twosomes

He’s like La Jolla’s own Tasmanian devil. Neil Senturia bolts out of his office into the recep­tion area to greet me, right on time for a scheduled interview. After a quick hello, he spins around to dictate an e-mail to his assistant, Nicky, about getting a tee time, cracks out a few more commands about mailing a document, whips back over to me with another handshake and a mumble about setting up space to talk in the other office, offers me a cookie from a crumpled Cheese Shop bag, then leaves to go freshen up before we can get started. I haven’t even taken a step, and I notice his wife, Barbara Bry, hasn’t either. She’s sitting behind the glass in the adjacent office, fixated on a U.S. Open tennis match. Calm and quiet. Opposites attract?

They’re known today as wealthy philanthropists and venture capitalists, but Senturia lovingly says that he married Bry “before she became rich.” The two were acquaintances in La Jolla throughout the 1980s. In 1993, when their first marriages had both ended, Neil bumped into Barbara at a fund-raising event at Symphony Towers and dropped a line: “I’m getting divorced, and I hear you are, too.”

Not exactly Humphrey Bogart, but both Senturia and Bry recount the story with glee. “Yes, that’s exactly what he said,” she remembers with a giggle. They soon had their first date at Fio’s in the Gaslamp and married in 2000. (“I adore her,” Senturia says proudly, multiple times during our chat.)

When they started dating, he was an out-of-work real estate developer (he’d recently finished work on the Harbor Club towers). Not for long. The two started a software company (something about high-speed Internet access in kiosks) in 1995 that sold to Cisco four years later for $80 million. Bry then put her Harvard business degree to work at fledgling ProFlowers as one of its founding shareholders and sold to Liberty Media for $470 million a few years later, which Senturia calls “another smash.” The two got in among a slew of small investors backing Jersey Boys, just before it hit big on Broadway and achieved Tony Award – winning status.

Winning — that’s what this twosome is used to doing. Taking risks and winning big.

That is, until their high-profile loss this year, when San Diego News Network — the hyper-local news Web site with A-list partnerships like the Los Angeles Times that was supposed to rapidly expand like a content–aggregating Cookie Monster gobbling up local stories from every corner of the country — finally died.

“We tried hard for SDNN,” Senturia offers. “Maybe it was the right idea and the wrong team? Maybe it wasn’t the right time? Or the idea wasn’t there?”

Bry is less willing to second-guess. She seems wistful, confounded and deferential still, after months of speculation and gossip about inflated traffic, disgruntled employees and Hail Mary investment strategies. A former reporter for the Sacramento Bee and early investor in Voice of San Diego, Bry seems to possess a real passion for journalism. It’s as if she saw SDNN as an opportunity to get back in the game, yet didn’t realize how much the game had changed on the business side. And no matter how wildly her Tasmanian devil partner spun to kick up interest, investment and revenue, the seed never took. 

But a tragic story theirs is certainly not. This philanthropic pair is busy with an upcoming teaching gig at UCSD (a no-credit course, taught through the Jacobs School of Engineering, on commercializing new technologies) as well as the launch of Senturia’s new book, I’m There for You, Baby, The Entrepreneur’s Guide to the Galaxy. Bry is also actively working with Run Women Run to get more pro-choice women elected to public office. And “the Jewish Brady Bunch,” as they refer to their family of four grown children from previous marriages, plans to spend the holidays together in La Jolla. I’m guessing that SDNN won’t be the topic of dinner conversation.