Old Friends Club keeps alum busier than ever

At 77, Bob Delf is working as hard as a volunteer Executive Director as when he was a CEO in the software industry.

Since 2024 he has been running Old Friends Club, a nonprofit designed to help communities strengthen families impacted by dementia. Old Friends Club has provided over 85,000 hours of respite for family caregivers, and social engagement for their care partners with dementia. It was founded in 2015 by his wife Karen.

As executive director, Delf (Math ’71) spends his days raising funds through grants, corporate sponsors and individual donors as well as finding new communities that need help.

“My background is running businesses,” Delf says, although when he came to UBC as an honours math student in 1967 he planned to be a math teacher. Between then and when he graduated in 1971, Delf got into UBC’s nascent computer science program.

“There were probably 10 of us in the class,” he recalls. “We only had mainframe computers and we didn't write any code. It was a very, very difficult program. All we had was the library—no internet— which I was in every day until closing.”

Just as he graduated as a math major with a minor in computer science, Delf landed a job as a computer programmer—called software engineers now—with a company in Vancouver making administrative software for schools.

“I thought I'd do it for the summer,” Delf says. “I was 14 years at that company including four years as CEO.”

He learned to code which he found to be an extension of the critical thinking he’d learned in theoretical math. But it was tedious—the code had to be written on a paper form.

“We had key punchers punching the data onto cards, and we put big decks of cards into the computer. If you dropped a box of punch cards, you were screwed!”

Tedious or not, Delf’s life was a bit of a whirlwind at the time.

“I'm also a classically trained pianist, and I had this unbelievably fortunate opportunity to be the musical director for the musical Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which was a massive hit in Vancouver. It was sold out every night for months in advance and I did eight shows a week. We'd have a standing ovation every single night. I did my programming job during the day, played the show at night, and then I would often go up to Simon Fraser University to use a computer at midnight because computer time was cheaper at night. I was 22 years old. The things you can do when you're young, right?”

Delf programmed for four or five years, but coding wasn't really what he wanted to do with his life. He was more of a people person, so he got into marketing and sales for the software company when its founder asked if he was interested in running the show.

“I said sure, but I don't know anything about running a company. So I went back to school and got an MBA.”

When the company opened an office in Seattle in 1978, Delf volunteered to move to run that office. He stayed, becoming a dual citizen, and lives today in Redmond, Washington. When the company was sold in 1985, Delf switched to running another software company that made programs for the mortgage industry.

“The venture capital guys that hired me wanted to put money into this company, but it had no management. And as it turned out, it was a shell of a company and the software they had was terrible, so we had to start over. We built new software and changed the name to Interlinq Software. That company went from nothing to $22 million in revenue in six years and became publicly traded.”

After Interlinq was sold, Delf’s accountant advised him he should be helping software companies run their businesses—so many in the burgeoning industry lacked marketing skills. In 1995 he started working as a consultant helping clients run their businesses.

Delf advises the computer science graduates of today to consider looking for a job on the corporate side.

"All businesses will need to figure out how to integrate AI in their processes," he says. "But we'll need fewer software engineers, since AI will be writing the code.”

After working seven days a week for 40 years he decided to wind down. But Delf didn’t retire. His wife had been busy too—running a day program for people with dementia in rural Seattle. But the program closed in 2015, leaving the families that relied on it in the lurch. Two weeks after the closure, Karen was able to help those families by starting Old Friends Club.

“We opened in a church just down the block,” Delf says. “If you're caring for someone with dementia, you drop them at one of our programs for five hours, two or three times a week.”

He soon discovered that in Greater Seattle there were tens of thousands of caregivers of family members with dementia that needed respite. Old Friends Club expanded to four centres running in four different communities before they had to shut down due to COVID. By then though, Delf had realized that with just him and his wife running things that the organization was unsustainable.

“We came up with a franchise model where a church or community centre runs the program as affiliates at no cost. We provide training and support and guide them through the process. Small rural areas do much better with this model that urban centres, and my theory there is that the people in those areas have a much better sense of community.”

Old Friends Club has nine locations today.

“It feels good. My goal is 12 by the end of the year, and then one a month going forward,” says Delf. “It’s like having two full time jobs. One of them is running the business, the other is raising money.”

“I've never done anything except be in the CEO chair since I was 32 years old, which I think is pretty unusual.”