Bill Taranto

What happened to the fund over time in 2016, Merck went through a big evolution.

We switched from being almost a consumer drug company in the pharma industry to a biologics company with the launch of Keytruda, which is the largest oncology drug in the world, supporting many, many indications around cancer therapy.

But during that switch, Merck came to us and said, look, we're not against you continuing to look at that future and look at sort of adjacency businesses.

But could you kind of then focus more on what are the biggest problems that are facing us in the industry and

and focus just a little more on what we call core sort of investment strategy.

And we said, yeah, we can certainly do that.

We don't have to change our actual investment strategy or our investment thesis or our execution strategy.

We just have to change our focus a little bit.

And so that was a big shift for us in 2016 to take a more active approach on solving what we call these use cases for both Merck and the industry.

And that's really much what we've been doing now for the past six or seven years is really focusing on those type of problems and how do we solve them using equity.

The other big transformation that happened during that time was around 2013 or 14, we started a private equity firm to sit on top of the venture capital firm.

And the reason for that was that the biggest problem we found that investing in digital and technology, and it was something we actually learned at our time from Johnson & Johnson, is that point solutions really don't work in the digital space.

You have to think of a broad integrated solution that scales.

And it's the hardest thing to do investing in this sort of space of scale.

So what we wanted to do is create this private equity fund that then could look at our assets within our portfolio, as well as assets out of our portfolio, work with other private equity firms, and then think about how do we scale?

How do we bring multiple companies together to form a more integrated solution?

Because any company you invest in, even ones that are these big growth equity firms, have gaps, right?

They don't solve 100% of the problem.

And the idea is how do you fill those gaps with other companies and then create a single company that provides the scale that pharma is looking for?

And that was a real big change for us was to have been able to create the private equity fund that allows us to deploy more capital and create the scale we need in the industry.