Bill Taranto

It was called HIT, actually, back in 2010, or technology and health.

It wasn't really called digital at the time.

But

That's what they were interested in.

And it was a bit odd because at the time Merck hadn't even had, they didn't even own a therapeutic fund.

In fact, the therapeutic fund that's at Merck called the Merck Research Labs Fund didn't start till 2015.

So five years later,

And I thought it was kind of odd that a big pharma was interested in doing sort of technology before they did therapeutic.

Now, obviously in their business development department, they were doing things like therapeutics and investing there, but not in a traditional venture capital sort of way.

But when they called, they said that what they really liked, what we were doing at J&J and what they really liked was how we were sort of looking at the future of healthcare and trying to predict where it was going.

And then could we enable the company by investing in technology and creating a

a opportunity for the company to be prepared for that future.

And that was sort of the original idea that they had, but it was based on what we were doing at Johnson and Johnson at the time.

So it wasn't really a stretch for us to kind of jump over and go to Merck.

We were kind of doing that already for the last, you know, 10 or 12 years at Johnson and Johnson.

So it was a pretty easy move to just kind of bring kind of what we were doing there, bring it over to Merck.

And Merck got the benefit of all those years of sort of expertise we built up in the practice we built up at J&J.

But that was their original mission.

What was kind of different at the fund at the very beginning, it was way more broad adjacency than it is today.

What they were really interested at that time was having us invest in companies that would be standalone companies, ultimately, that they could potentially acquire that would drive revenue and EPS.