Thanking Fletcher McCusker, one of our community champions

This week, we are celebrating our biggest milestone to date! Our very first round of Forge’s signature Accelerated Entry Program starts this Friday. In case you missed it, check out the 12 startups we invited to participate. 

On this important week, we are honoring one of our champions, Fletcher McCusker, by sharing a bit of his story and the critical role he has played in making Forge possible. 

Fletcher is no stranger to Tucson’s business and entrepreneurship community. He has worn many hats in this remarkable professional journey, from a lengthy career in healthcare management, to founding Providence, and later SinfoníaRx, to most recently launching UAVenture Capital Fund (UAVC). 

A Tucson native, and first-generation college graduate, Fletcher calls everything in his life a “happy accident.” But if there is one word that captures his legacy, it’s impact.

After a few early pivots, Fletcher found his passion in the healthcare field, where he saw he could really make a difference. After two decades helping to build organizations around the country, Fletcher took this mission of service to the next level when he came home to Tucson and launched his first company in 1996, Providence.

After only 8 years, Providence went public, with 350 locations and 11,000 employees.

Fletcher is now retired, but that hasn’t slowed him down at all. Among many ways he supports the local community, he has made many financial contributions to UA projects and gained notoriety after being asked to serve as the business driver to the first university spin-off, SinfoníaRx, a pharmaceutical venture that started as a research project by Dr. Kevin Boesen.

Within 20 months of launch, the company was servicing 65 million patients which caught the eye of Tabula Rasa HealthCare, and ultimately led to the sale of the company in 2013. 

In reflecting on what this moment signified, Fletcher explained that “to create an exit was hugely important for the university. It demonstrated that not only did we have projects that were investable, but projects that other people would be interested in putting their money.” 

That same summer, President Robert Robbins arrived at UA with a resume that included 20 years at Stanford, where faculty partnering with startups was the expectation, not the exception. In their first meeting President Robbins encouraged Fletcher to keep this entrepreneurial effort going and help the university’s research, largely dependent on grant funding, be amplified through commercialization. 

And with this, Fletcher and his co-founder, Michael Deitch, became what he affectionately called “accidental venture capitalists.” UAVC launched their first fund in 2017, and have made 12 investments to date, with another 8 in the pipeline. 

The funds are designed specifically to help finance UA connected enterprises, because as Fletcher explained, “we have countless patents that have never been given the opportunity to commercialize. The missing link is money.” 

Around this same time in 2017, Fletcher was invited by a group of UA leadership, including President Robbins, on a trip to Colorado State to visit The Powerhouse, a unique university-led entrepreneurial hub focused on energy innovation. 

Everyone agreed that it was critical to build a similar innovation anchor in Tucson, and coincidentally, this very idea was already top of mind with then Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. He introduced Fletcher and the UA team to Brian Ellerman, who brought years of experience leading corporate innovation and partnering with startups, incubators, and accelerators around the world, and he was ultimately hired to lead Forge. 

Fletcher admits that while the process took longer than most imagined, UA leadership always insisted that the time is now. And now it’s real! Pima County has stepped up to support Forge through the use of the historic Roy Place building and Startup Tucson will activate the space with critical programming for entrepreneurs.

"The whole community has risen around the startup ecosystem. You couldn’t have scripted a better coming together of energy. And our fund has become a large part of that ecosystem.” 

But Fletcher sees his role as being much bigger than writing a check. He engages meaningfully as a strategic partner and encourages the ventures he supports to stop talking about money, and instead “talk about the impact you’re going to have, the value of what you’re doing, and the legacy you’ll leave behind.”  

“All of us are doing this on behalf of something that is much bigger than ourselves.” 

For Fletcher, Forge is part of a larger vision of seeing Tucson become a vibrant and innovative city that is competitive in the fourth industrial revolution. 

Join us in welcoming our first cohort of startup teams and thanking Fletcher McCusker for his unwavering support of this project.