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Jim Weiss

Chief Executive Officer, Real Chemistry

Jim Weiss serves as Chief Executive Officer of W2O Group (“W2O”). Jim has nearly 30 years of experience in strategic media and marketing communications, focused primarily in the healthcare and technology sectors. He has been involved in nearly every aspect of corporate, product, and organizational communications.

He ranks among the 500 Most Important People in the Global PR Industry (2015, 2017) and PRWeek’s Powerlist (2012, 2013, 2014) and was named a Top 25 Innovator in Communications (2014). Recently, he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Cancer Research Institute, where he serves on the Marketing Subcommittee.

Jim is also a founder and sponsor of the W2O Center for Social Commerce at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, his alma mater. The Center has become a leading academic program aimed at providing students with modern media analytics and digital insight and skills to set them apart from their peers. He was inducted into the Newhouse School’s Hall of Fame and honored as one of its 50Forward most accomplished graduates of the last 50 years.

In 2016, Jim partnered with Kim Hunter at The LAGRANT Foundation (TLF) to form the first-of-its-kind paid healthcare fellowship that places ethnic minorities pursuing careers in healthcare communications in one of W2O’s offices. He is committed to diversifying the workforce and currently sits on the Board of Directors at TLF.

Jim spent most of the first half of his career as a client, which inspired him to build an agency he would want to hire. Before starting his own firm, Jim was head of corporate communications and investor relations at Bay Area medical device start-up Heartport, a pioneer in minimally invasive cardiac surgery. Prior to that, he helped establish the global product marketing communications function at pharmaceutical giant Sanofi in Paris. He started his corporate career at biotechnology bellwether Genentech in South San Francisco during its formative commercial years in the early 1990s. While there, he supported the marketing, sales, investor relations, government affairs, and communications functions.

He resides with his wife and two children in the San Francisco Bay Area, where W2O is headquartered.