Randal J. Kirk - Business Milestones

Business Milestones

In 1983, along with John Gregory, Kirk founded General Injectables and Vaccines (GIV), a Bland County-based next-day supplier of medical supplies to doctors. In the mid-1990s, the successful company spun off King Pharmaceuticals, a Bristol, Tennessee-based company that manufactured drugs that GIV distributed. Kirk and Gregory split, with Kirk keeping control at GIV and Gregory leading King. In 1998, Kirk and his ownership team sold GIV to Henry Schein, Inc. for approximately $65 million cash, with $25 million in deferred payments.

Kirk founded New River Pharmaceuticals Inc., a company that developed technology to make existing drugs safer and more resistant to abuse, and took the company public in 2004. The company developed and won FDA approval for Vyvanse, an attention deficit disorder treatment, in 2007, shortly after Kirk sold the company to Shire plc for $2.6 billion. He owned more than half the company at the time.

In 1999, Kirk began a company called Third Security, LLC, a Radford-based investment firm. Third Security operates as a long-term venture capital fund, "pouring money into startup biotechs for equity or board positions, and remaining with them until they go public or sell out to a strategic buyer." Kirk, however, prefers not to be called a VC. "It's not venture capital; it's not private equity. They're true capitalists. They put money out, they want to know how much is coming back and that kind of jazz," he says. "We're really looking for opportunities where, through our personal efforts, we can add value." In 2004, Third Security combined with Carilion Health System and the Virginia Tech Foundation to create NewVa Capital Partners, a private equity/venture capital fund designed to support private businessmen operating in Southwest Virginia or willing to relocate to the region. Kirk intentionally keeps the number of investments at Third Security relatively small, another way, he insists, he's different from conventional venture funds. "The main thing we look for is, if we believe we can try to help, then we can add value through our personal efforts," he says. "If we're not adding value ourselves, there's not a reason for us to be working in this thing. If we're going to live and sleep and breathe this thing for a decade, we've really got to love it."

Kirk was on the board of Fremont, California-based Scios Inc. when it was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2003 for approximately $2.4 billion. More recently, he served as chairman and majority shareholder of Newton, MA.-based Clinical Data, Inc., an antidepressant drug developer that was acquired by New York-based Forest Laboratories Inc. for $1.2 billion in 2011.

Kirk is currently the CEO of Intrexon Corporation, a privately held, synthetic biology company founded in 1998 by Thomas Reed in his last year at the University of Cincinnati, where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in molecular and developmental biology.

He says that the money can come easily if you find something you love “and that society finds valuable.”

His new companies have avoided venture capital.