In early 2015, Broadcom co-founder Henry Samueli stood at a vacant lot at Irvine’s Great Park Neighborhoods, touting the company’s forthcoming campus on the site as a future hub of new technology, research and innovation in OC to a small crowd of media and city officials.
I attended that event, one of Samueli’s last public appearances prior to Broadcom’s $37 billion sale to fellow chipmaker Avago Technologies—a deal announced shortly afterwards.
Four years later, Samueli’s predictions appear to be coming true, albeit not the way many expected.
City of Hope’s planned $1 billion Great Park Neighborhoods cancer-fighting campus, anchored by one of the four buildings initially planned for Broadcom and with more acres allotted for future growth, promises to make the area “a hub and a catalyst” for innovation and research, but now with more of a healthcare focus, FivePoint Chief Executive Emile Haddad said last week.
Whereas the initial Broadcom development was envisioned as a one-company event, the City of Hope campus should be seen as a “community asset” that’s likely to stimulate commercial development and business activity for a host of companies in the area for years to come, he said.
Last week’s announcement is arguably the biggest news for the former El Toro Marine base since Haddad, then with Lennar, acquired the site in 2005.
The Samueli family now has a massive integrative medicine institute planned a few miles away at UCI. Could the two work together? “We’ll partner with anyone” that’s invested in beating cancer, including the area’s schools, City of Hope Chief Executive Robert Stone said. See our front-page story for more.
“The only question now is whether the original Allergan unit—based in Irvine—can thrive as part as AbbVie,” said a recent report from life science trade pub Stat, which last week delivered a blunt assessment of Activis’ 2015 acquisition of Allergan, describing the $70.5 billion buy as a failed experiment.
Last week’s news that AbbVie was planning a $63 billion buy of New Jersey’s Allergan (like Broadcom, the acquired companies’ names were kept by the buyers) will no doubt bring more change to a local campus that seen plenty of it the past few years; Allergan employee count in OC is down about two-thirds from five years ago, Business Journal data shows.
“The biggest challenge may be whether teams that have already lived through one culture clash will stick around through another one,” the Stat report said.
City of Hope could use some good researchers for its new campus.
OC’s cybersecurity headlines have focused on CrowdStrike’s June IPO, and the sale of Cylance this year to BlackBerry (see story, this page) of late, but there’s others in the sector worth watching—and working for.
Take South Coast Metro’s TechMD which is on our Best Place to Work list for the fifth time since 2012, and a member of Inc. 5000’s fastest-growing companies for five years running. See our Best Places to Work special report for more details, starting on page 17.
