Dede Willis

Dede Willis General Information

Biography

Ms. Dede Willis serves as a Partner at Ventac Partners. She joined Ventac Partners in 2003. She brings over 25 years of international experience in start-ups and turnarounds to the group. She has expertise in strategic planning & execution, cross-cultural team-building, joint ventures & strategic alliances, acquisition negotiation & integration, product development from concept to commercialization, capital project management, business process reengineering, FDA regulatory processes for drugs & devices, sales & marketing, and forecasting, budgeting & financing. She spent the first 15 years of her career with the former Hoechst Group where she worked in several corporate start-ups in the U.S. and Germany, gaining operational experience in every functional role and across multiple industries. In her first overseas assignment, she was responsible for developing and implementing a global innovation process for corporate research which became the process for allocating a $500 million research budget. Her last position with the Hoechst Group was President and CEO of a $100 million coatings subsidiary. Since then, she has served as COO of three life science startups where she managed numerous product launches, clinical trials, and capital projects. Most recently, she was the co-founder and COO of Boulder Diagnostics, a company whose technology was acquired by Oxford Immunotec in 2014.