So, This Is What a Biotech Tycoon Looks Like

The biotech tycoon wears a suit. It's a sartorial heads-up. It lets people know Termeer means business. Not in a bad way, just in a way that's unique in an industry that hasn't been marked by much, well, industriousness. The biotech world is a domain of business casual, a realm of scientists content to test theories.

Termeer, by contrast, is a B-school grad who extols the virtues of the market and excels in the wringing of profits—a paradigm buster if ever there was one.

By and large, biotech firms are founded by academic types who, after working out some hunch in their university lab, get together with some deep pockets to commercialize their big idea. The relevant factor, as far as patterns of dress are concerned, is that the Ph.D.s continue to drive the bus in these companies, which hardly makes for a suit-and-tie culture. The corresponding knock on biotechs has been that they harbor a fondness for the abstractions of academia, and the tinkering, plodding pace of trial and error. For all the hype lavished on the industry—and few have been hyped more—it's this turning science into money that remains a tough trick.

Of course, Termeer has never been calibrated like those peers. And thus his outfit matches his outlook—more Wall Street than Kendall Square. Careful, though: Termeer may be a suit-wearer, but he is no suit per se. It is his dress that is conservative, not his mentality.

The biotech tycoon was nearly a shoe salesman. The occupation had been a good one for his father and his grandfather before that, and Termeer figured running the family shoe company would suffice for him as well. It was after college, while working in London, that he rethought his path. "When I went to England, my mindset changed. I became more disconnected from home," he says. "If I had returned, I would today be selling shoes. It was a good business. It was comfortable, but it was not an innovative business in any way. It was fashion."

With little more than a conviction that he wanted his hand in something transformative, Termeer enrolled in the M.B.A. program at the University of Virginia. When he graduated in 1973, he went to work for the medical services behemoth Baxter International, a firm that was earning a reputation for minting aggressive young leaders. There, his own boldness was quickly rewarded. Though hired as an assistant to a marketing executive, he told his bosses that he didn't much care for his title or his role as an underling. Baxter brass rewarded the kid's moxie and made him a division manager. "That was the culture there, for sure," says fellow Baxter alum Elliott Hillback, who was on the interview team that hired Termeer and is now a senior vice president at Genzyme. "We were all lucky enough to have been hit between the eyes with great leadership lessons early on." The sink-or-swim atmosphere at Baxter cemented into guys like Termeer the sense that they could master the medical industry by working the business angles. They weren't doctors or chemists, and they learned they didn't have to be in order to solve problems.

By the late 1970s, the warm promise of something new was beginning to take shape at the margins of healthcare, and it had the markings of what Termeer had been looking for all along. Advances in science—particularly in so-called recombinant technologies—made it clear that drug makers would soon be able to engineer genes or whip up proteins in a lab. This was the bright hope of biotech. And there would be a gold mine for those who could figure out how to make a business out of it all.

The pitch Genzyme headhunters made to Termeer in 1983 probably went something like that. If they were big on the hope of tomorrow and that sort of thing, it was because the present-day picture of Genzyme was a little grim. Just about the only thing the two-year-old company had going for it was its potential. Launched by a scientist from Tufts who brought in a few others from Harvard and MIT, the startup operated 15 stories above the Combat Zone in an old garment building on a dodgy stretch of Kneeland Street. What money Genzyme had trickling in came from a couple of plants it ran in England that made chemicals for bigger companies, as well as a deal with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to collect placentas for an experiment researchers were performing there. The company was desperate for a dollars- and-cents guy who could turn the meager operation into something sustainable.

Termeer was so smitten with the chance, he signed on for half of what he was making at Baxter. "He came because he thought there were some products he thought he could sell," a former Genzyme executive says. "He must have had a huge shock once he arrived, because those products weren't really as great as he must have thought. But he was opportunistic. Always."