David S. Williams III

Chief Marketing Officer, Head of Business Development

PatientsLikeMe

David S. Williams III is Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Business Development at PatientsLikeMe having joined the company in its earliest days. Author and evangelist of the company’s Openness Philosophy, Williams is responsible for developing the corporate brand, patient acquisition, community operations and overall business strategy. The Openness Philosophy has been featured for its progressive approach to health information by leading media including The New York Times, Newsweek, Businessweek, Wired, Fast Company, numerous academic journals, and life science trade publications.

Williams has grown PatientsLikeMe to a community of more than 75,000 members all working to improve patient outcomes and quality of life. He has helped multiple top 20 pharmaceutical companies better align their business goals with patient needs by developing services that provide wins for both. For example, industry partners see PatientsLikeMeInsights™ and PatientsLikeMeListen™ as key services that amplify the patient voice and experience with chronic disease. The PatientsLikeMe Clinical Trial Awareness service has helped multiple pharmaceutical partners accelerate their trial recruitment helping to bring breakthrough treatments to market faster. As a result of this successful alignment of patient and industry goals, Williams is a recognized thought leader in pharma interaction with social media. He has been quoted in Marketwatch, Bio-IT World, and numerous trade publications. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and a published author in Nature Biotechnology and the Journal of Communication in Healthcare.

Prior to joining PatientsLikeMe, Williams held institutional sales and global strategy positions at pharmaceutical leader Eli Lilly and Company with a focus on the psychiatry and neurology therapeutic areas. As Director of Community Development at venture-backed health media firm Spotlight Health, he built online health communities numbering in the hundreds of thousands working with celebrities including Larry King, Carnie Wilson, Montel Williams and Rodney Dangerfield. Earlier in his career, Williams was a management consultant with Deloitte’s health care practice, focusing on hospital strategy and health plan evidence-based utilization management.

A successful entrepreneur, Williams has founded two consulting companies focused on fundraising — one for non-profits (featured in Black Enterprise magazine) and the other for start-ups looking for venture funding (where he helped companies raise $25+ million). He guest lectures at several major business schools and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at UCLA. Williams earned his B.S. in Economics with a concentration in Entrepreneurial Management from The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania and holds an MBA in Digital Strategy and a certificate in Corporate Governance from the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management.

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