Global Corporate Venturing Rising Stars Awards 2018: Blake Arnold

“I love meeting people, I love networking, I love getting on the ground and having discussions and feeling things out for myself, and so I am so looking forward to going scouting for companies at conferences, meeting with entrepreneurs, and hearing about all the exciting things they are working on.”

It is always refreshing listening to someone as passionate about their job as Baxter Ventures’ associate director Blake Arnold.

Having freshly joined Baxter’s venture team in September last year, Arnold is in charge of prospecting new deals, and evaluating teams, products and companies for future investments.

“I made the decision to come to Baxter to join the business development team straight out of my MBA at the Kellogg School of Management in 2015,” according to Arnold.

“It was a very well-known and respected company in Chicago’s North Shore, and given the transformation that was under way at the time, I knew it would be an exciting opportunity to come in and work on new projects.”

Baxter International indeed went through a major restructuring in 2015, as it separated its biosciences division into a new entity named Baxalta in a bid to reduce cost and streamline operations. After the spin-off, Baxter took $4bn in dividends and retained a 19.4% stake in Baxalta, with plans to use the cash to repay debt.

In January 2016, the company also welcomed new CEO José Almeida, who replaced departing Robert Parkinson Jr.

Arnold said: “Over the course of my studies, I thought about my career, and I really wanted to be part of an organisation through which I could have an impact.

“What better place to do this than somewhere that has a corporate mission to save and sustain lives?”

The associate’s passion for healthcare goes way further back than when he joined Baxter though. A fresh graduate from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BBA in finance, investment banking and international business, Arnold spent the first seven years of his career at Chicago-based wealth and asset management company Baird, where he progressively evolved through the positions of equity research analyst, associate and senior associate.

At Baird, Arnold focused on the biotechnology sector exclusively. This was a specialisation that, he said, enabled him to “understand the science and technology behind the companies I was analysing and covering, and find truly innovative companies that really made a difference for patients”.

His interest in venture, meanwhile, was something he developed during his time at Kellogg, where he took an experiential internship course and worked as a venture fellow for startup venture capital firm Mercury Fund, assisting in deal evaluation for seed and series A investments in life sciences and healthcare technology.

Reflecting on the associate’s path, Anne Sissel, vice-president at Baxter Ventures and a GCV Powerlist 2017 winner, said: “Blake brings a strong background in evaluating healthcare companies for purposes of investment or acquisition.

“He proactively focuses on the critical value drivers, and is dedicated to achieving excellence in the execution of investment opportunities and building the right toolbox to be a strong investor. “

As senior manager within Baxter’s corporate business development and strategy team from 2015 to 2017, Arnold largely focused on M&A transactions and contributed to some major company initiatives.

“I think by the end, I felt I had achieved what I had set out to do in that group, and I was ready for the next challenge,” Arnold recalled. “Luckily, Anne was looking for someone to join the venture unit at the time, and I had known of her and her team’s great reputation for quite a while.

“We had also had conversations in the past, and seemed to share a lot of similar views on the company and its great mission.

“Joining the unit was an opportunity for me to be part of a high-performing team, and focus on early-stage disruptive business models and technologies that can really impact patients’ lives.”

Set up in 2011 by healthcare group Baxter International with a $200m capacity, Baxter Ventures mostly targets patient care companies with innovative technologies. One of its most recent investments was a $38m C round co-led with MVM Life Science for biosensor system developer VitalConnect.

Having joined the unit only a few months back, Arnold said he was looking forward to entirely immersing himself in the world of venture capital, and taking the pulse of innovation around healthcare.

He added: “I am keen to bring my own learnings and style to venture investing, and to continue contributing in a positive way to what Baxter Ventures has built so far.

“I am a firm believer that diversity in experience and different approaches really enrich the overall ecosystem: it all starts with a strong understanding of your own identity, of who you are, of who your team and your corporate parent are, and then you need to find your own strengths, and fill the gaps with the right pieces.

“This is a really important process I believe any new team member has to go through when they try and evaluate how they can add value.”

And because one challenge was not quite enough, Arnold recently became the father of a little baby boy, which is a new role that he is slowly trying to master, too.

Reflecting on the process of learning, he said: “I think with any transition into something new, it is important to recognise you’ll always get the feeling there’s not enough time for you to do everything.

“If you had enough time to do all you wanted, especially in CVC, you could spend the entire day looking at pitch books, reading articles on new products and development, or watching technology demonstration. Essentially, you could spend the entire day learning.

“But there’s only so much time for it, so the best you can do is be disciplined and use your free time judiciously. CVC itself is certainly a learning curve and that’s probably one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much.”