William Gordon

Business Advisor

Bill Gordon is an experienced entrepreneur with time in the C-Suite as CEO, CFO, and COO. He has also been an angel investor in his 35+ years of financing, building, and growing early-stage technology companies in bioscience and broadband communications.

Bill’s first major entrepreneurial effort was co-founding Callahan Associates International (CAI) in 1996 with a partner who had been the former head of US West International. CAI built the first large-scale triple-play broadband communication networks in Spain, France, Belgium, and Germany. As co-founder and CFO, Bill led the successful effort to raise combined debt and equity in excess of $5B.

In 2006 Bill took the role of CEO at Tetragenetics, a biotech platform company, where he was an early angel investor. As CEO he struck an economic development deal with the state of Massachusetts to move the company from Ithaca, NY to Cambridge, MA. On the research side, Dr. Gordon was the Principal Investigator of an early Gates Grand Challenge Exploration Phase 1 Grant: “Using Tetrahymena, to Produce Malaria Vaccines.”

Bill is very proud of his efforts between 2008 and 2014, helping to plant the seeds of what is now an extremely healthy innovation culture in CT. In 2013 Bill and his partner Andy Moss ran the first state-funded accelerator program that led to the birth of CTNext. In 2015 Bill and his wife moved away from Connecticut to Portland, Oregon, followed by Denver, Colorado. Early in 2022, they finally realized they had become homesick for Conn. and moved back in April 2022, so Bill could join the team of advisors at the CT SBDC and reignite his local network.

Bill earned a BS degree in Biology from Wayne State University, followed by a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Zoology. He spent five years at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CHSL) devoted to his pre-and post-doctoral research under James Watson of “Double Helix” fame. After his Ph.D., he earned an MBA in Marketing and Finance from the Wharton School.