New VP at Philly Chamber is a former tech industry pro who’s all about building relationships

The marketing pro recently left his role as VP of marketing and communications at Ben Franklin Technology Partner of Southeastern PA after 10 years with the organization. He’s joining the Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia as its new senior vice president of marketing and communications.

“The relationships are always the priority of what we’re doing,” Bannon told Technical.ly. “They’re always the priority to me.”

This move came from Bannon’s wanting to expand on that collaboration work and bring it to Philly’s wider business community, he said. He described the goal to transfer what he learned in tech and life sciences as an “interesting challenge.”

“Figuring out how to take those formative startup community lessons, and scaling it and moving it into other sectors,” Bannon said, describing his new role at the Chamber, where he expects to continue to build relationships and build up the region.

Bannon joined Ben Franklin in 2014. At the time, people were still talking about software company Boomi’s success — it was acquired by Dell in 2010. Philly Startup Leaders was picking up steam and the Commerce Department was working on Startup PHL, a grant program to support local startups and entrepreneurs. Bannon describes that time as building up the community and having fun doing it.

As a former Comcast employee, Bannon knew a little about the tech community in Philly at the time, but he didn’t fully know the scope of what Ben Franklin did and all the sectors it touched.

Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners is a statewide org with four branches that provides capital and other resources to tech companies and other stakeholders. The org’s role in the tech ecosystem is constantly changing as Philly’s tech community changes, Bannon said. The group used to focus on advocating for Philadelphia as a great place to start a tech company, but now that idea is more widely known.

“I was hired to do marketing, which I did, which was great,” Bannon said. “But as many of the soft connections of bringing people together that I got to be around in the room for, that ended up becoming just the better story to tell.”

As he leaves the organization, it’s now focused on building partnerships and connecting other stakeholders. The EDA Tech Hubs proposal, for which Ben Franklin has led the charge, is an example of not only the shift toward the life sciences sector, but also how the region has become more collaborative than it used to be, he said.

People tend to focus on the negatives, specifically because the last few years have been a challenging time to raise capital, Bannon said. But the overall ecosystem is better than it was five or 10 years ago.

“We have to do a better job of reminding ourselves that this is a challenging moment, but we have not lost progress,” Bannon said. “We may not be spinning as fast in this moment … but we have come so far and we have built so much.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.