Five weeks before revealing his run for Congress, Jim DeBello registered a domain for the 52nd District drive against Rep. Scott Peters.
But if his advisers had their druthers, the site wouldn’t be debellocongress.com. Instead, it’d be debellomayor.com.
“I was determined to get involved” in politics, he recalled a couple weeks after his November launch. “Many people encouraged me to look at the [San Diego] mayor’s race.”
In the wake of his January exit as president and CEO of Mitek Systems, DeBello said he reached out to San Diego County Republican Party Chairman Tony Krvaric, former County Assessor Greg Smith, county Supervisor Greg Cox and even Democrat Steve Peace, the former state lawmaker.
“Here you are a CEO,” he said he was told. “We don’t have a Republican running for mayor. It would be great to have you in there, Jim.”
DeBello says he appreciated the thought, but felt more suited to the national stage. (A Republican finally entered the mayor’s race when Councilman Scott Sherman raised his hand in late November.)
“I’ve lived abroad,” DeBello said, noting years as a Rotary Scholar at the University of Singapore and work in China during his Qualcomm tenure.
“Many members of Congress have never been outside the country. I understand finance very well,” he said. “I’m compassionate on the cultural issues. So I felt it was important … to go ahead and get involved in the national area.”
To many outside GOP circles, James Bernadotte DeBello is little known. But in the South Bay, where he grew up, he’s been a longtime up-and-comer.
Descended from Italian and Polish immigrants (pre-World War I), DeBello attended Valley Vista Elementary in Bonita.
At Bonita Vista High School, DeBello was ASB president under Greg Cox, a 24-year-old teacher. (“I called him my mentor back then,” he says.)
His parents come from upstate New York — his father an FBI special agent first sent to Kalispell, Montana, and then to Los Angeles. (DeBello has autographs from J. Edgar Hoover, “complimenting my dad.”)
DeBello’s father left the FBI to join Rohr Corp. founder Fred Rohr, and the three-son clan moved to Chula Vista and then Bonita. Jim DeBello was 12 when his dad died of pancreatic cancer. His mother, who could teach Spanish, found a job with the local school district.
DeBello played football and baseball at Bonita Vista and was accepted at Harvard, where he was a 6-foot, 210-pound defensive end on a 3-6 team in 1979. In 1980, he earned his B.A. in economics and history there, followed by an MBA in 1986.
At 24, he met Tracey, his future wife, in Los Angeles while he was working for Peter Ueberroth in 1982 at the L.A. Olympic Organizing Committee — dating long distance. Now married 33 years, they have a 21-year-old daughter, Hadley, studying philosophy, politics and economics at Harvard and aspiring to work in cultural properties — repatriation of artifacts.
Now DeBello aims to repatriate conservative values in the 52nd.
“I’m a strong patriot,” he says. “I really do believe in our democracy as a system of government and in our capitalism as a system of economy, and I think we are moving further and further to the left, and that concerns me greatly.”
He bemoans the rhetoric of “irresponsible giveaways” as cynical and impractical “because I really don’t think anyone proposing these crazy ideas really thinks they can pay for it without bankrupting the country.”
So after a “20-year journey” in corporate leadership, the Point Loma resident says he’s inspired to tackle national issues.
For nearly 30 years — since 1990, when he founded Solectek Corp., a wireless LAN market supplier — he’s voted in all but eight San Diego County elections for which he’s been eligible, a registered Republican.
But since 1999, according to opensecrets.org, he’s made only three direct political donations — $500 to short-lived GOP presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole in 1999, $1,500 to the county Republican Party this past June and the maximum $2,800 to Donald Trump on Sept. 11, 2019.
In 1996, Qualcomm named DeBello vice president and assistant general manager of its Eudora division, overseeing its Internet email software. He also was part of the executive team that worked on what he calls the first smart phone.
“We called it the PDQ,” he says. “It looked like a small brick. That’s the first generation. But it had a camera on it, and it was experimental. And the thought was maybe this was like the Swiss Army knife, the smart phone of the future.”
In the late 1990s, he saw the future of the camera — which started out at low VGA quality and eventually became 5 megapixels, “at which time I said: Terrific — that camera can act like a scanning device. But what problem are you going to solve? That’s where the check part came in. So you marry the two.”
Now he depicts the Mitek mobile check deposit software he co-invented as “a very green product” — used by 80 million people, saving 10 minutes of drive time per deposit for a total of 1 billion man-hours saved.
Launched 10 years ago, he says, it took two years to get its first customer — JPMorgan Chase. But Bank of America followed, along with Wells Fargo and CitiBank.
After 15 years as Mitek CEO, he says he decided: “I’m 60, kind of a magical time. I’m not getting any younger. I’ve got a lot of energy and a lot of experience and I wanted to bring this to the table.”
But in leaving, he also retained an ownership stake.
His 2018 base salary was $468,000, according to SEC records, but his total compensation in 2017 was $2.4 million. Just before quitting Mitek in January, he sold 50,000 shares at about $9.45 a share. He still had 703,000 shares left. Stock price at Friday’s close was $7.63.
“I did benefit from increasing shareholder value,” he said in November. “I partook of that through a variety of programs the company offered as an incentive. So it wasn’t given to me. I feel I earned it and then was able to harvest it.”
He’s been in the CA52 race for such a short time that he hasn’t yet filed campaign finance disclosures. But he’s up against Peters, the four-term incumbent who had $2 million cash on hand as of Sept. 30.
Other declared candidates are Ryan Cunningham (no party affiliation), who gave himself $5,000 and had $2,758.88 left, and Democrat Nancy Casady, who raised $3,556 and had $3,481.28 in the bank.
No matter his wealth, DeBello is given little chance of upsetting Democrat Peters in the November election.
“It underscores why Scott Peters wisely chose to stay in Congress rather than run for mayor,” says Carl Luna, the San Diego Mesa College political science professor. “He has a safe seat with which to maintain his political career and advance the interests of his constituents rather than rolling the dice on a mayoral election.”
But Luna sees DeBello — endorsed by the county and state GOP — as almost certain to finish in the top two in the March primary.
Thus he’ll be in the November runoff where, “barring the reddest of impeachment inflamed Red Tides, he loses to entrenched incumbent Peters in a purplish and blueing district,” Luna says.
Second of two parts
