Bill Taranto

And that's actually a pretty good comfort where we're not always, you know, our LP isn't demanding.

Don't we have to be evergreen and return financial returns?

It's not like Merck is a $60 billion company.

Even if I return, you know, a million dollars in a year, that money is rather insignificant on the broader P&L of a Merck where private companies, you know, venture firms have to return that back to their LP on a continuous basis.

So I think that takes some pressure off of us to think more strategically.

um and and make smarter investments because we're not under that sort of pressure constantly to return to our lp though as i said you know let's not fool ourselves uh we have to make returns and there's no i've always told everybody a corporate there's no cfo that says it's okay to lose money um all corporate venture firms need to make you know a ritual under capital

Yeah, so I'm on my third CEO, and I've actually had 10 different direct bosses in my 16 years.

And the reason that's never affected us is because we have a very solid,

investment thesis and execution thesis that's not changed in the entire time we're there our investment thesis is based on two different things it's based on the fact that we use this term data is the currency that we're going to use to transact in the future healthcare market which if you actually look at our entire portfolio they're all data companies and data is that currency which drives healthcare the other thing that we mentioned a little bit earlier is that we don't believe point solutions work we need to work in an integrated ecosystem so we invest

by doing ecosystem investing, which leads into our tactical strategy is we execute by doing this sort of ecosystem investing where we try to find an anchor tenant that can solve most of the problem we're trying to solve or the use case.

And then we invest around it in smaller companies that can fill the gaps.

And over time, if we can use our private equity to combine and build scale, you know, that's what we do.

And I think that's an important piece that we communicate back to the organization that no matter the change in Merck,

You know, you changed in 2016 from being a consumer-based pharma company to a biologics company.

That didn't change us.

All we did was shift our focus, but our strategy didn't change.

We never have changed the way we execute or the way we think about investing.

That has remained constant.

And then being able to communicate that to the change in leadership,

you know, makes us a constant.