Rank last year: 13
William Taranto has made big waves since he moved to US-based pharmaceutical group Merck four years ago as the group made a push into non-pharmaceutical healthcare. The Global Health Innovation Fund under his leadership has grown quickly to a $500m pool.
Taranto, said at our symposium this year when he joined Merck, it was transitioning to a new chief executive. He said: “If you ever hear [Ken Frazier] speak, he has a vision of Merck being a broad-based healthcare company, so in the context of what I do for a living, if you look at the continuum of healthcare from pre-diagnosis to death, the question for Merck was: how do we participate in that continuum where the pill or the vaccine makes up only one piece of healthcare? There is a great deal of stuff beyond what we do as a core business that happens in healthcare, and can we actually have an impact broadly around healthcare where, again, the pill supplies only one piece of it?”
Taranto added: “We then decided that venture capital was the best way for Merck to do that. It allows them to look at the future of healthcare, take bets on a number of different areas and then, if it fits strategically and financially, it becomes an option for them to acquire those companies.”
The business has already secured some exits. Taranto said at the Symposium: “We have actually had four exits to date – two to Merck and two outside to healthcare where we built a very valuable healthcare company where perhaps Merck was not the rightful owner and we were able to exit much more broadly. One of the other things we did in March last year was start a sister firm, also a growth equity fund, which allows us to do bigger and better deals and extend our optionality around assets that we like, but perhaps we need some partners to help us grow in a more efficient way, or Merck is perhaps not ready to acquire them because of consolidation issues, or just we like them but we are not sure what we want to do about the property yet, but we want to grow them into billion-dollar businesses. That in a nutshell is what we are doing at Merck.”
Taranto came to Merck from a similar role at Johnson & Johnson and after a degree from Saint Bonaventure University.