Meet Partner, Linda Bernstein!

By Lori Thiel

San Diego Social Venture Partner’s new board member Linda Bernstein spent 20 years accumulating knowledge about how to successfully run a business, knowledge that in retirement she wants to share with area nonprofits through her work with SDSVP and other philanthropic organizations.

Despite her demonstrable business savvy, Linda — who ran a start-up from her home and sold it 20 years later after growing it to 50 employees and 500 customers worldwide — was an unlikely manager. With an education degree from UCLA and work experience as an elementary school teacher, she took the plunge into the world of business in 1982 when her husband Robert started SeaSpace Corporation in their San Diego home.

SeaSpace provides satellite ground stations and processing software to sense meteorological, oceanographic and environmental data from space. So it was a natural next step for Robert, who earned his Ph.D. in physical oceanography from Columbia University and founded Scripps Satellite-Oceanography Facility.

Within a short while of starting the business it became apparent that someone needed to manage it. So Linda gave up her teaching job to run the company.

“SeaSpace,” Linda remembers fondly, “was like a science fair project for my husband” who is a renowned oceanographer and an expert in satellite data acquisition. But for a novice businessperson, Linda had to learn on the go. She went from the classroom where she taught elementary school to the boardroom, where she learned the hard way how a business operates.

During her time with SeaSpace she learned to draw on resources and look to other credible sources for help. In the last five years of her tenure at SeaSpace she participated in Vistage, a CEO leadership organization that hosts monthly workshops and networking opportunities for professionals to share insight, strategies and support. There she met like-minded entrepreneurs and made long-term friends. One in particular had a commitment to philanthropy and led her to SDSVP.

As she learned more about SDSVP she says she appreciated the meaningful work the organization does partnering with nonprofits to help them solve problems. “It’s a smart way to invest time and money,” she says.

Given her background in childhood education, it’s not surprising that she particularly enjoys SDSVP’s focus on those areas. “One of the major ways to improve the world and raise people out of poverty is through education,” she says.

And Linda has done her share of raising and educating children: Her son Aaron, 36, is a business developer at Qualcomm locally, and her daughter Sarah, 33, is a physical therapist in Oregon. Each has two children, making Linda a grandmother four times over.