Profile Lisa Walters-Hoffert wins over investors interested in biotech

Lisa Walters-Hoffert Wins Over Investors Interested in Biotech

isa Walters-Hoffert is hardly ever at a loss for words.

Even in her life’s most embarrassing moment in front of millions of viewers when the Spanish-speaking moderator of Costa Rica’s No. 1 talent show asked her a question she didn’t understand, she saved herself with wit, charm and grace , by praising the country’s beauty and its people.

Walters-Hoffert never learned what the actual question was. But she knew from the excitement of random people who approached her on the streets that they loved her television comeback nevertheless.

Five years later, the managing director of Roth Capital Partners Inc. of San Diego, still wins people over with her extroverted persona and friendly smile.

Her San Diego-based clients, biotech firms Alliance Pharmaceutical Corp., Cypress Bioscience Inc., and Immusol, bank on Walters-Hoffert to attract investors to fund their costly drug discovery and development.

In 1999, Walters-Hoffert raised a total of $178 million for her biotechnology clients.

Personality Sets Her Apart

Duane J. Roth, CEO of Alliance Pharmaceutical, who has worked with Walters-Hoffert for years, said her mix of analytical thinking skills, vitality and real concern about clients sets her apart in the banking world.

“She has the kind of personality that makes you comfortable very quickly,” Roth says.

“Sometimes people are there to do a transaction, they don’t really care about what you are doing she cared enough to work with me through good times and bad times.”

These attributes and the hundreds of millions of dollars she raised to fund Alliance’s work led to their friendship and an even closer business relationship.

Byron Roth, chairman and CEO of Roth Capital, hired Walters-Hoffert in 1997 based on his brother Duane’s recommendation.

A socialite, Walters-Hoffert has always enjoyed the spotlight whether as the captain of the cheerleading team or president of the Tri-Delta sorority at Duke University.

A bit of luck, her excellent networking skills and her drive to succeed paved the way from the loan office into investment banking.

Adventurous Spirit

Open-mindedness and an adventurous streak propelled the small-town girl to the Big Apple, onto her husband’s sailboat, a life in Costa Rica and, finally, to San Diego.

If it wasn’t for her semi-retired husband Michael , the calming force in her life , Walters-Hoffert would probably still inhale the fast-paced life of a New Yorker, she says.

But that’s a lifestyle her husband, a Northern California native would never endure, she says. It also wasn’t the life Walters-Hoffert knew early on.

The daughter of an insurance controller and a homemaker, she grew up in “perfect little suburbia,” in the community of Abington, which lies just outside of Philadelphia.

At Abington High School, Walters-Hoffert, (who is 5-foot-ten inches tall) says she already towered over her peers and dated mostly basketball players.

But by the time she went to Duke University in 1976 ,a campus known for its premier basketball team , Walters-Hoffert still enjoyed watching the game, but was less enthusiastic about dating its players.

For the first two years, she was torn between pursuing a medical career as originally planned, or switching to a business major.

During an internship at Duke’s teaching hospital she finally realized she “didn’t have the stomach” to become a doctor.

Friends Near And Far

In 1980, with a bachelor’s degree in business at hand, Walters-Hoffert and a girlfriend struck an unusual deal.

The agreement called for the first girl that landed a job in either Boston or New York City to be followed by the other.

Her friend landed a job in New York first. One week later, Walters-Hoffert was offered a job at Chemical Bank in New York, too.

So the women moved into what Walters-Hoffert described as the “tiniest apartment one can ever imagine” , a one-bedroom apartment at 63rd Street and First Avenue in Manhattan , hardly a cozy home.

“You go home and sleep,” Walters-Hoffert says. “I think that’s why New Yorkers are so active, they have no living space.”

Still, Walters-Hoffert stayed for 12 years.

She worked for Chemical Bank for six years, climbing the corporate ladder from trainee to loan officer to investment banker.

In 1984, a former college friend and headhunter tipped off Walters-Hoffert to an opening at Oppenheimer