After working for DuPont (which became DuPont Merck) for 17 years, Bill Schmidt decided to take his act on the road. The company elected to stop developing drug candidates for pain that Schmidt had been working on, based on the belief that no new drug could compete with cheap generic drugs such as morphine and aspirin. (This was four years before Pfizer’s Celebrex and Merck’s Vioxx became multibillion-dollar analgesic products.) But Schmidt was certain he could take his pain drug candidates successfully through clinical trials via a start-up company and simply told his superiors, “I’d like to buy the products that I’ve been working on.” To his surprise, the company agreed and asked him to consult for them on the other projects he left behind.
That first consulting job gave him a taste for the rewards of this type of work. “When companies pay top price for a consultant, they ...
