by Mike Bailey
Well before Kim Blickenstaff returned to the town the legendary television journalist Charles Kuralt once characterized as in “the middle of Illinois which is in the middle of the country which is in the middle of the world,” the home-grown entrepreneur and philanthropist had carved out quite a niche for himself in the medical diagnostics and device industries on the nation’s West Coast.
Blickenstaff, who grew up in the Peoria-area community of Spring Bay, had worked for others at Baxter Healthcare International in Chicago and at Hybritech in San Diego before going out on his own with a few partners in 1988 with Biosite. They ultimately prospered, but it was no sure thing at the time, no small risk.
“There was a lot of growing pain in it,” Blickenstaff said in an interview for the San Diego Technology Archive at the University of California San Diego 24 years ago. “You know, raising money is not an easy thing to do, and a lot of people looked at me and said I wasn’t a CEO.”
Alas, there were people who believed in him, then as a 30-something, even if he sometimes doubted himself.
Beyond that, there was a willingness to work hard at learning what he recognized he didn’t know. Again, from that 1997 UCSD interview: “Knowing what’s in vogue … Where does your business fit into the industry in a larger sense? Not just thinking of yourself as a company and a product. And I didn’t do that exceptionally well in the beginning.
“You have to know what’s getting financed publicly, what’s hot in the minds of the institutional investors, what the successes are and failures, so you know how to frame yourself in view of the larger world.”
Finally, Blickenstaff had to demonstrate an ability to build upon the innate sense of confidence and optimism that makes someone an entrepreneur in the first place, in order to sell himself and his product to others. “You really have to have, as a CEO, a sense of where you’re taking this thing, and the conviction to sit across the table and say, ‘This is the route we’re going.’ You can’t say, ‘Maybe we’ll do this, and maybe we’ll do that.’”
What resulted at Biosite was a rapid test developed for hospital emergency rooms to detect and identify the presence of specific drugs in suspected overdose cases. That was followed by the Triage Cardiac Panel, which quickly identified and differentiated markers in the blood released when the heart is distressed due to a heart attack or some other cause.
In both cases, the time to get the information necessary for doctors to make a potentially life-saving treatment decision was dramatically reduced. First and foremost, lives were rescued and improved because of those inventions. Second, unnecessary hospital costs were cut substantially.
Before Blickenstaff would depart Biosite in 2007, the company also had made advances in the creation of rapid tests for stroke and sepsis.
At that point in his career, Blickenstaff, then in his mid-50s, made a big move to Tandem Diabetes Care, also in San Diego. His achievements there have been well-chronicled, most notably Tandem’s development of a state-of-the-art insulin pump that, again, has much improved the lives of those who were suffering from the chronic complications of diabetes.
For Blickenstaff, it has been a reaffirmation of the career decision he made as a young man following his graduation from Illinois Central College in 1972, then from Loyola University Chicago a few years later.
“When I got out of business school … it just took me three interviews to figure out that health care was vibrant, growing, profitable, technology-based, benefiting mankind,” he told UCSD. “Some of these other companies that I’d looked at that were, you know, making paper, making steel … these were products that people used but had no attachment to, that were thrown away.
“There were a lot of (biotech and health care) companies that were getting started and it was like, ‘Wow, that’s the place to go.’ … For me, it was not a hard decision at all.”
No one achieves anything great or lasting without having friends on the way up the ladder, or without having doubters along the way. Both motivated him.
Ultimately, Kim Blickenstaff has built companies from the ground up and brought them back from the brink. He’s taken companies public and learned the ways of Wall Street. He’s taken enormous risks and is now enjoying the rewards.
And central Illinois, his hometown, is now lucky to be able to reap those rewards right along with him.