Making the Leap from Pharmaceuticals to Private Equity, Venture Capital

Jeremy Goldberg of Arsenal Capital Partners.

Jeremy Goldberg is an Operating Partner of Arsenal Capital Partners (which has greater than $10 billion AUM), a private equity fund where he focuses on networking and sourcing transactions for the healthcare team. He also serves as a Senior Advisor to $75 billion AUM (TPG) Sixth Street Partners and on several private company board of directors

Goldberg has over 25 years of experience, mainly focused on investing and business development in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Goldberg served as Managing Director, Corporate Development for Endo Pharmaceuticals (Nasdaq: ENDP), a leading pain therapeutics company.

Goldberg has served on the Visiting Committees at Dana Farber Cancer Institute since 1999 and on the board of the International Research Alliance, a private sector philanthropy supporting NIH and Oxford and Cambridge University since 2007. He serves on the board of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association. Mr. Goldberg graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College and with distinction (top 10% of class) from the Harvard Business School.

Q. With a 0.5% acceptance rate being the norm for some venture capital firms’ recruitment efforts, the selection process makes the 3.59% admit rate for Harvard’s Class of 2028¹ seem easy. Given your senior executive role at Endo Pharmaceuticals, what were the steps which enabled you to enter into a new career path that seems to be extremely exclusive in terms of the selection process?

A. Goldberg: With one report that pointed to how 12 schools produced over 42 percent of all venture capitalists,² attending the right alma mater is a step in the right direction. Still, one needs to bring truly differentiated value propositions as the majority of prospective hires are alumni from the same handful of schools and professional services firms. Furthermore for me, I was coming in from the pharmaceutical industry and so my career track was not a typical one.

But my interviewing contact pointed out that I had two value propositions which unlocked the doors for me and they were business development and personal relationships. For BD, a comment was made on my rainmaking skills at Endo where I closed twelve transactions, including three FDA approved medicines that generated over $250 MM annual sales. (Private equity/venture capital [PE/VC]) leaders tend to be competitive and so they were pleased that during my tenure at Endo, we had grown the topline from $500 MM + to $1.1 Billion in sales, generating about $1 MM revenue/employee which was about two to three times greater than our peer companies.

Finally, the hiring team had apparently done their homework and knew of my tight connections with C-suite executives of Fortune 500s, managing directors of premier consulting firms and academicians at top schools. By coincidence, I met many of these people during my formative college and business school days when we were all bright-eyed and energized to pursue our career aspirations.

By good fortune, several of these friends have reached the top echelons of their respective organizations. In the PE/VC world, rainmakers strive to get on the calendars of such prominent leaders and so my employers over the years have always placed value on my ability to reach out to old friends who will graciously take my calls.

Q. With the grueling workload of 80-plus hours when PE deals are in motion,³ how does one stay connected with family and friends when there are so many competing time demands from co-workers and clients? This doesn’t even factor in the hours necessary to stay informed of evolving trends for one’s business ecosystem?

For example, what AI expertise is needed given how one recent finding was that “Artificial intelligence (AI) may have a future role to play in deal sourcing and target selection: 54% of GP investment professionals expect it to have an influence on those workflows.”⁴

A. Goldberg: First, having been happily married for 30 years to my wife and spending time with our four children, I would recommend that your readers critically self-evaluate how much time they are investing in family time versus career time. This industry does require blood from its employees but you don’t want to be a rich partner at some firm and have no family or friends to enjoy it with since you’re always either traveling or pulling another all-nighter for an open deal.

Second, figure out creative ways to stay connected in both a business and personal context. For example, when the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association nominated me to assume a Board position, my work schedule was extremely packed. Still, as the club was striving to engage prominent leaders to participate in their local panel discussions, career Q&A interviews, and its flagship annual conference, I figured out that I could invite some of my college and business school pals to participate and so it was a win-win situation all around.

For the club, they had luminaires including the Board Chair of BCG, the Dean of Harvard Medical School, today’s interim Dean of Penn’s Medical School, an MIT professor who serves on the Board of Overseers of Harvard, and many others participate in our alumni events. I introduced them at the programming and it was a lot of fun to see friends who I have known for decades.Moreover, you have had some of my friends agree to engage in this Q&A series.⁵

And so for me, I am able to reconnect with old friends and meet new ones. For instance, an executive (who was the FDA’s Principal Deputy Commissioner/Acting CIO) was a guest panelist at one of the annual conferences and I believe she participated in the Q&A series as well.

Based upon getting an even better understanding of her deep expertise in technical/healthcare themes, I recommended to my Arsenal colleagues that we recruit her to become the co-chair of our AI advisory board. So think about different platforms, such as an alumni association, which can maximize the limited hours in a day to support your personal and professional goals.⁶

Finally, study evolving trends, like generative AI, and determine where they might catalyze explosive growth. For example, for your Wharton undergraduates whom you teach; encourage them to see if they are able to connect the dots between Penn Med and their Wharton studies.

Right in their neighborhood, there are world-leading cell and gene therapy innovations that are being developed at Penn Med where my college friend is the interim Dean. And students who are smart, hardworking, and can offer value to potential advisors; they should do their homework and figure out who might be some great mentors as my college friends (the Dean of Harvard Medical School and the founding Dean of the Koch Institute at MIT) were fortunate during their early years, to have mentors who happened to be Nobel Laureate winners. As the saying goes, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

About the Author

Michael Wong is a Part-time Lecturer for the Wharton Communication Program at the University of Pennsylvania. As an Emeritus Co-President and board member of the Harvard Business School Healthcare Alumni Association as well as a Contributing Writer for the MIT Sloan Career Development Office, Michael’s ideas have been shared in the Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

References

1. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/3/29/harvard-class-of-2028-regular-decision/#:~:text=Harvard%20College%20accepted%203.59%20percent%20of%20applicants%20to%20its%20Class,considering%20race%20during%20the%20process.

2. Hess, Abigail Johnson, These 12 schools produce the most venture capitalists, CNBC Make It, March 16, 2018

3. https://growthequityinterviewguide.com/private-equity-hours

4. Oey, Amanda, Private Equity and Venture Capital Industry Shows Resilience and Optimism in 2024 Amidst Shifting Market Dynamics,S&P Global, April 29, 2024

5. https://www.pharmaceuticalcommerce.com/view/the-role-of-fearless-organizations-in-global-crises

6. https://www.pharmexec.com/view/making-the-transition-from-oncologist-to-principal-deputy-commissioner-acting-cio-of-fda