Steve Burrill left investors waiting from Minnesota to San Francisco

Steve Burrill loved an audience. And he found plenty of them.

With his trademark pink tie and grand exhortations about the future of biotechnology, Burrill gathered awards and speaking gigs the way hobbyists collect stamps and Pez dispensers. An online biography runs to no less than 1,100 words. Among his assembled plaudits: Scientific American once named him one of the world’s top visionaries in 2002.

As much as he adored the spotlight, Burrill may have grown too fond of the perks that came with it. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently barred Burrill from professional investing after he admitted to embezzling $31 million from the venture funds he managed. Burrill used the money to support his failing businesses and to pay for a lavish lifestyle.

Burrill did not respond to a request for comment left through his attorney or messages sent to him through LinkedIn. Public records do not list a current address or phone number. The office in the Presidio of San Francisco listed on his website is vacant, with his name off the building directory and the space up for lease. No one seems to know his current whereabouts.

Burrill left behind more than an empty office. He left behind empty promises, too. He helped fleece an entire state, playing the starring role in a notorious boondoggle that people in Minnesota would rather forget. In 2009, around the same time he was beginning to siphon off money from his investors for personal use, Burrill traveled to Minnesota, promising to raise a $1 billion venture fund to back a biotech park in — of all places — an elk farm in rural Pine Island.

‘Music Man’

Based on Burrill’s ambitious plan, Minnesota spent $36 million in state funds and federal stimulus dollars to build a highway interchange directly to Elk Run, as the project was called. The interchange was built. The fund and park never materialized. It’s now Minnesota’s own “bridge to nowhere.”

“Burrill was the Music Man,” said Peter Bianco, a health care executive who worked at a Minneapolis firm at the time Burrill came to town. “He was always this mythical figure. He was too good to be true.”

How Burrill could so easily seduce Minnesota offers a cautionary tale to all of the government officials and economic development groups from around the world who flock to the Bay Area and Silicon Valley, hoping to replicate our seemingly magical blend of money, innovation and entrepreneurship. To people in the Midwest, a region left unsettled by the decline of manufacturing and agriculture, Burrill was more than a pocketbook and a pocket square. He personified the idea that they, too, could create an economic miracle out of nothing.

Or in Minnesota’s case, an elk farm.

Former accountant

As a reporter in the Twin Cities at the time, I wrote pieces that, in hindsight, should have been more critical of Burrill’s background and intentions. I spoke to Burrill several times, but to this day, I’m still not quite sure if he deliberately tried to con Minnesota. My best guess is that Burrill, so absorbed in his own hype, genuinely believed he could pull off his biotech dreams, despite all suggestions to the contrary.

Burrill’s transformation into a nationally known biotech guru is a bit surprising. He was not a scientist or entrepreneur. He was an accountant from Wisconsin who desperately wanted to distinguish himself from his father, George, a prominent accounting executive himself.

“Every place I went, I was George’s boy,” Burrill once told me. “I didn’t like being George’s boy, so I was going to get as far away from my dad as I could.”

He ended up in the Silicon Valley office of Ernst & Young, where over the course of nearly three decades he rose to partner and head of the firm’s manufacturing and high-tech practice. But Burrill grew restless, and wanted a direct piece of the deals he frequently helped advised.

“I built probably the greatest Rolodex in the world,” Burrill said to me. “The frustrating side of that was we saw enormous value (and) wealth being created, but I didn’t share in it. I decided as I got into my later life that it was time for me to make my living based on what I owned instead of what I did.”

He eventually formed Burrill & Co. in San Francisco, an unusual hodgepodge of businesses, including merchant banking, private equity, venture capital and publishing. The last business really distinguished Burrill, whose annual reflections on the state of biotech under the Burrill Report name were considered an industry bible. (The Burrill Report website is now offline, and the Internet Archive’s last record of it is in August.)

Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Burrill became a sought-after speaker who traveled around the world, telling audiences in Brazil and China what kind of breakthrough technology to expect next.

“He was a great motivator and ideas person,” said Bob Egan, executive director of the Vilas County Economic Development Corp. in Wisconsin, where, according to Egan, Burrill still owns a home.

Burrill made sure to project a certain image: He always wore a pinstripe dark suit with that trademark pink tie and pocket square. Attractive young female assistants were never far from his side.

For Tower Investments, a real estate firm outside of Sacramento, Burrill was a secret weapon. Tower was trying to convert more than 2,000 acres of empty land in rural Pine Island into residential homes and commercial office space.

Given the site’s remote location in southeastern Minnesota, the company desperately needed the state to build an interchange to connect Highway 52 to Elk Run.

“That interchange was everything to making that project work,” Bianco said.

Timing off

It was extremely bad timing. The recession struck the country in 2008, and state officials were in no mood to give tax dollars to an out-of-town real estate company trying to develop a large cornfield primarily inhabited by elk.

Enter Burrill. In 2009, he and Tower proposed an audacious plan to win public support for the project. Tower would build a 200-acre biotech business park that would incubate startups funded by a $1 billion venture fund created by Burrill. The idea was to build a “biotech corridor” that would connect the University of Minnesota and medical device makers in the Twin Cities north of Pine Island with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester to the south of the town.

But Bianco, a fierce critic of Elk Run, had major doubts.

“It made absolutely no sense,” he said.

Neither Tower nor Burrill had any experience developing a research park. And despite Burrill’s reputation, raising $1 billion during a severe economic downturn seemed unrealistic.

But with Burrill’s name attached to Elk Run, Tower was able to persuade the administration of Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty to spend $2 million in state funds on infrastructure improvements to the site and snag $34.3 million in federal stimulus money to build the interchange — all before Burrill signed up any investors for the $1 billion fund or Tower recruited any tenants to the park.

“Everything happened just so fast,” said former Minnesota state Sen. Kathy Saltzman. “You got the sense that people like Burrill must see something here, they must know better than us so you shouldn’t be questioning things.”

Crumbling fortunes

Behind the scenes, Burrill’s empire was falling apart.

From 2007 to 2013, as Burrill was promoting Elk Run, he was secretly transferring millions of dollars from a $283 million life-science venture fund he managed to support his other money-losing businesses. The cash shortage got so bad that Burrill could not even afford to pay rent or his employees.

So using his accounting skills, Burrill concocted several schemes to hide the illegal transfers, according to the SEC. He listed cash transfers as “advances” on fees the fund regularly paid Burrill to manage the portfolio. He also began asking investors to commit more capital to companies and then used the extra money to cover expenses unrelated to the fund.

Burrill “knew, or was reckless in not knowing, that the money called from investors would be used in part to continue funding cash flow shortages, significant portions of which were wholly unrelated to the fund’s business and included propping up Burrill’s other business ventures that were operating at a loss,” SEC officials wrote in the agency’s orders barring Burrill from the industry.

But Burrill wasn’t content to just exploit the fund to finance other parts of the company. He also used cash to pay for things like vacations to Paris and the Caribbean, private car and jet service, charitable contributions, jewelry and gifts for both his wife and mistress, SEC documents say.

And in addition to Elk Run, Burrill was actively trying to start new funds, which would presumably pay him more management fees. In 2012, Burrill & Co. said it raised $125 million to create a venture fund in Brazil, backed by money from Brazilian institutional and corporate investors and up to $5 million from the Inter-American Development Bank. The organization in Washington would also invest up to $4 million in the Burrill Chile Fund.

In August 2013, the investment committee of the fund Burrill was pilfering discovered the scheme and eventually removed him. Other investors quickly moved to sever ties with him.

Geri Smith, a spokeswoman with the Inter-American Development Bank, said the Chile fund never started operations, though the Brazil fund is active but under a different name and managers.

“The General Partner and Fund discontinued its relationship with Steve Burrill in April 2014,” Smith said in an email. “Steve Burrill is no longer associated in any way ... with the GP or the Fund.”

In addition to barring him from the industry, the SEC ordered Burrill to pay back $4.8 million and pay a $1 million fine. The agency declined to comment on whether he has done so.

But that’s little comfort to the people of Minnesota. The state had built the interchange, but with no $1 billion venture fund, there is no Elk Run Biosciences Park. Tower Investments still owns some of the still-vacant land but no longer lists the Elk Run project on its website.

Silicon tumbleweeds

A few years ago, I spoke with Jawed Karim, a co-founder of YouTube who originally hails from St. Paul. A product of both Silicon Valley and Minnesota, Karim uniquely understands how each region works.

In Silicon Valley, if people knew you worked for a big company like Hewlett-Packard or Oracle, they would offer to get you a job at a startup, Karim said. But in the Midwest, if people knew you were starting a business, they would offer to get you a job at a corporation like Medtronic or 3M.

In other words, entrepreneurship and risk taking don’t come naturally to Midwesterners, who tend to prize stability and longevity. Yet they envy Silicon Valley’s dynamic economy and want to replicate it.

Therein lies the danger.

To outsiders, the temptation is to quickly construct a building, slap the word “innovation” on it, and hope something takes root. But Silicon Valley owes a great deal of its success to its natural fortunes. The region happened to be blessed with world-class research universities in Stanford and UC Berkeley, a fail-fast culture, a large venture-capital industry, and visionary leaders like William Hewlett, Steve Jobs and Andy Grove.

“Everyone tries to copy Silicon Valley, but in reality there’s no copying it,” said Marc Weiser, a managing director of RPM Ventures in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Empty fields

Regions should develop their own model for economic development, spearheaded by local leaders in education, government, and business, instead of an outsider like Burrill, said Weiser, who splits his time between the Midwest and Silicon Valley.

“When we blindly follow someone, that’s when we get into trouble,” Saltzman, the former state senator, said.

I recently visited Burrill’s office in the Presidio’s Headquarters Building. Burrill had long cleared out: The office was dark and empty, with the window blinds closed. He had planned to run a “virtual” biotech incubator from the stately building. Like the fields elk once roamed in Minnesota, it proved entirely virtual.

Today, the only visible sign of life at Elk Run is a new elementary school built on land that Tower donated to Pine Island.

“We have commercial parcels available for sale on Bioscience Drive,” Tower Senior Vice President John Pierce said in an email. “The new freeway interchange is complete and the frontage roads have been constructed.”

“The project is ready for construction,” he said.

And Minnesota is still waiting.

Thomas Lee is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. E-mail: tlee@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @ByTomLee