San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
San Antonio’s chief imagineer
Port CEO inspired by Disney for his vision of the city’s technological future
Port San Antonio President and CEO Jim Perschbach loves to look up and ahead.
The up part comes from his love of all things aviation and practically growing up on airplanes. As for looking ahead, credit that to his childhood hero, Walt Disney.
“I have always since I was 5 years old and first went to Disneyland (been) absolutely fascinated by the parks,” said Perschbach, 51. “And the first thing is the storytelling. If you go to EPCOT, especially in the ’80s and the ’90s, the ability to go through one of those pavilions and actually understand some reasonably complex topics, just because you spent five or six minutes going through one on an Omnimover, I thought was truly impressive.”
These days, Perschbach is practically San Antonio’s chief imagineer.
Since taking over Port San Antonio in 2018, he has transformed the former Kelly AFB of yesterday into a sprawling technological world of tomorrow, all with the goal of making San Antonio a tech hub of the present while still honoring its past.
This year alone, the port opened its $70 million Tech Port Center + Arena, a combination concert hall and esports stadium that’s hosted the Smashing Pumpkins and a “Halo” tournament with esports teams from all branches of the military. The port also will be the future global headquarters of DeLorean Motor Co., best known for its 1980s sports car turned time machine in “Back to the Future,” as the company shifts gears to producing electronic vehicles.
Then there’s the real forward-thinking stuff. A couple of weeks ago, Perschbach unveiled plans for a multistory office tower to house DeLorean along with Jetsonslike designs for a “vertiport” to manage vertical takeoff and landing vehicles and a simulated lunar terrain lab to develop space-based manufacturing.
All of this is in addition to the port’s ever-expanding work in cybersecurity, robotics and other tech fields, plus housing the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology, where visitors can learn about innovations such as email and the personal desktop computer that have roots in the city.
As Disney once said, it’s kind of fun to do the impossible. And if there’s one story Perschbach wants to tell with Port San Antonio, it’s that the city has the perfect stage for all sorts of imaginative innovation.
“It’s not just silly for people to say there’s no tech in Southwest San Antonio. This is the center of the tech industry for San Antonio,” he said.
Look back to look ahead
For all his futuristic plans at the port, Perschbach has never lost sight of the site’s legacy.
One of his favorite stories to tell is of Kelly being built in 1917 when airplanes shared the grounds with horsedrawn wagons. Back then nobody knew what was going to happen with aviation, but Kelly evolved and expanded with the burgeoning technology.
And as Perschbach likes to stress, that happened thanks to its many workers from San Antonio, especially from the city’s Hispanic community and surrounding Southwest Side.
District 4 Councilwoman Adriana Rocha Garcia grew up on that side of town. She recalled touring Tech Port Center + Arena with Perschbach about a month before it opened. From the rooftop, he pointed to a few Kelly fixtures still on-site, such as the F-15A Eagle fighter plane just north of the new arena.
“He said, ‘Councilwoman, look over there. That is our history, that is our past, but this is what is going to tie us into our future,’ ” Garcia said. “It’s that bridging of the past and the future. And Jim is the perfect leader for it because he gets it. I think it’s a good mix because we have to pay attention to our history but still look to the future.”
Port San Antonio has created more than 5,000 jobs in the past 4 ½ years, Perschbach said. It boasts more than 80 employers with nearly 16,000 workers on campus. Those employers include Boeing and Knight Aerospace, the 16th Air Force (Air Forces Cyber) and Alamo Regional Security Operations Center, and soon DeLorean and other developers with an eye toward futuristic manufacturing and travel, be it electrical, aerial or lunar.
But Perschbach said the port’s growth isn’t just for headhunting blue-chip talent. He noted that all profits from Tech Port Center + Arena go
into the Kelly Heritage Foundation, a nonprofit that develops educational and workforce programs to connect young people as well as adults with career opportunities on the campus. Meanwhile, the San Antonio Museum of Science and Technology has reached more than 80,000 students.
And just as EPCOT opened a young Perschbach’s eyes to technology, getting San Antonio youths excited about shaping the future is a big part of the port’s mission.
“That’s really what I think is incredible about Jim,” said Will Garrett, the port’s vice president of talent and technology development and integration. “Not just the visionary piece and the success it’s proven, but it’s really where it’s rooted in. That’s what’s exciting for San Antonio.”
All his worlds together
Sure, it’s fun to see an esports arena and science museum share space with a future vertiport and research park, Garrett said. But the real excitement at the port, he added, is in how the Kelly Heritage Foundation creates educational and economic pathways for kids to pursue their own future careers and innovations.
All while preserving the surrounding area’s past.
“If you come down here, you’re still going to see a 1947 grocery store across the street. You’re still going to see some World War I and World War II warehouses,” Perschbach said. “And we want people to understand that if they invest in us and invest in our community, we’re going to continue investing and making it look like a place that puts them on the stage that they need to be.”
Born in Charlotte, N.C., Perschbach fell in love with aviation at an early age. His
grandfather worked with Eastern Airlines out of Charlotte, while his father left the Army to become a defense contractor, which took his family all over the world.
It was in California as a kid in 1976 that Perschbach also fell in love with Disneyland and the Disney theme park experience. Not so much the rides but how the park operated so efficiently with little traffic or wait times between attractions. A few years later at Disney World, Perschbach marveled at all the futuristic displays at the newly opened EPCOT.
He went on to study business at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in the hopes of landing a job at Euro Disney in France. When that didn’t pan out, he pursued a law degree at the University of Houston Law Center.
That’s when all of Perschbach’s passions started to come together. He went on to advise aerospace and advanced manufacturing clients as an attorney, then joined Port San Antonio in 2014 as executive vice president of business development. He was named president and CEO in June 2018.
The future is now
Working in such varied fields has taught Perschbach not only to entertain solutions from different directions but to apply them in different directions, too.
“I see my job as kind of being a matchmaker,” he said. “Because we have capabilities in so many areas, if you start to bring these groups together you’ve got the ability to look at these innovations, pick out the ones that might actually have some potential to develop and see what happens out of that. We’ve done that here at Port San Antonio.”
As for the next wave of innovations at Port San Antonio, Perschbach would tease only one, though it’s particularly personal to him.
Last year, Perschbach was diagnosed with colorectal cancer, which he said he has overcome. Undergoing a battery of treatments got him up close and personal with surgical robots, he said, which can be monitored with video screens and operated with joysticks. That got him thinking about the port furthering such technology in San Antonio.
“If we can get to a level where the surgeon can be here in San Antonio and the patient could be in a disaster zone or a war zone or in space, then you’ve got the ability to truly save lives,” he said.
Just as Disney envisioned a better world with EPCOT where technology could advance communities and cultures, so, too, does Perschbach see Port San Antonio as a resource that’s already making a better tomorrow for San Antonio today.
He then added with a laugh that if the port’s original home can evolve from horses and buggies prepping the land for airplanes, it can continue to evolve with diesel-powered trucks clearing the way for electric passenger and cargo vehicles and lunar development for the future.
“Somebody from 1922 wouldn’t recognize the San Antonio of today. We’re not going to recognize the San Antonio of 2122, but it’s going to be a better place,” he said. “And people are going to look back, and nobody’s going to remember who I am or who anybody at the port is. But I hope somebody has a picture of some of this stuff that we’re building here.”