Powerlist2014: Darren Carroll, Lilly Ventures

Darren Carroll has had a varied and two-part career at Lilly Ventures, the corporate venturing unit of US-based drugs company Eli Lilly, in which he has worked across multiple aspects of its business. In his present role as vice-president of corporate business development at Eli Lilly, he oversees acquisitions, private equity deals, partnering and corporate venturing. He came to the role after five years at Lilly Ventures.

Carroll said he sought to make Lilly Ventures, which manages about $500m, more like the outside venture industry in terms of incentives and structure. He said: “If corporate venture capital groups are good at what they do they can get cherrypicked for talent by institutional venture capital firms (VCs). I did not think it was appropriate for Lllly shareholders to be financing a feeder school for the VC industry. We would know if our investments generated good financial returns, and also if our investment professionals were attractive to institutional VCs. We have to provide a strategic return and have to be financially successful. We were prepared to take appropriate steps to attract and retain the people managing results, such as carried interest [a share of profit].”

He added: “We created a new fund, Lilly Asia Ventures, which is the only corporate life sciences VC in China. For four years, until late 2011, I spent a week of every month in China. The rest of the time was in my role as vice-president of ventures. I helped to create a new fund type, known internally as the mirror fund, working with external fund managers TVM and Healthcare Ventures.

These mirror funds use strategic and institutional capital to develop potential medicines to proof-of- concept stage, using very lean methods of development under the direction of the external VCs.”

In the early 2000s, Carroll developed new businesses for Lilly. He said: “One of the businesses I created and founded was Innocentive, which was the first open-innovation company in the physical sciences.”

Carroll’s background is as a lawyer, having previously worked at law firm Bond Schoeneck and King, and at Eli Lilly in the 1990s his brief included depression drug Prozac. He said: “Starting a career as a drug lawyer as the attorney for Prozac is like starting your education at the post- doctoral stage. It exposed me to nearly every critical aspect of regulation, sales and marketing in medicine.”