Key Takeaways
- Mentorship is both natural and essential. Jim Weiss’s career reflects a lifelong commitment to mentorship, especially of women in healthcare, emphasizing that effective leadership includes guiding and uplifting future leaders.
- Precision communication and AI are transforming pharma marketing. Weiss advocates for data-driven, personalized messaging in pharma, applying principles from consumer marketing and integrating AI to improve targeting, efficiency, and engagement—while maintaining the human touch.
- Purpose-driven leadership fuels innovation and growth. Weiss attributes the success of Real Chemistry to aligning people around a clear mission—making the world healthier—and believes that great performance stems from strong culture, clear purpose, and effective communication.
It’s common for leaders in the pharma industry to discuss the importance of mentors. Many say they have benefited from a guiding hand, and just as many discuss providing this service to younger members of the industry themselves. Mentoring future leaders allows current leaders to help steer the course for the industry in the coming years.
Jim Weiss, the founder and chairman of Real Chemistry, has a long history with the Healthcare Businesswoman’s Association (HBA). Over the past decade, he has provided the HBA with guidance as an advisor and partnered with the organization to advance its mission. He has worked with multiple HBA CEOs and helped with the transition from one leadership team to the next. For Weiss, working with the HBA is a way to push positive changes in the industry.
“The HBA is a way for me to be involved, both as a mentor and a driver,” he tells Pharm Exec. “Most of the people who work in the C-suite at Real Chemistry are women. I’ve had many women partners and bosses over the years. My mom was a CEO way before her time, so I grew up with the concept that women lead. That was never a question to me coming up, especially in the communications and marketing industries. It always made sense to make sure women were in the room, had a voice, and were represented in the C-suite.”
Earlier this year, Weiss was selected as the HBA’s 2025 Honorable Mentor. This accolade is given to someone who has a history of not just mentoring women in the industry but also helping promote them and guide them to leadership roles.
However, Weiss says that being a mentor isn’t something he actively sees himself as. Instead, it’s something that just comes naturally to him.
“I think it’s just my way in the world,” he explains. “I’ve always operated in a way where I’m seeking mentorship. The way to get it is to give it. It’s that old adage: You get what you give. Over the years building my own company, I learned to be a mentor. It wasn’t like I knew how to do it right out of the gate, and I wasn’t always great at it.”
Learning lessons early in life
Some people find their calling early. While he still hadn’t decided on his career path by this point, Weiss says that he felt himself becoming a mentor all the way back in high school when he served as his student council’s president in northeastern rural Pennsylvania. This continued into college, where he played an important role in his fraternity, both as a recruiter and mentor.
“I wouldn’t say being a mentor was totally purposeful, but it’s become a way of being as I grew Real Chemistry from zero to where it is now,” he adds.
With 2,500 employees today, Real Chemistry is technology-enabled service provider for the healthcare industry, offering advertising, integrated communications, medical communications, and activation grounded in “digital-first,” AI-driven analytics and insights. Weiss founded the San Francisco-based company in 2001 and served as CEO until early 2022, when he pivoted to chairman. To this day, he provides mentorship to Real Chemistry colleagues and clients.
A precision approach to communications
“While I was working at Genentech in the ’90s, we had a CEO and other people who were our guides there, and their vision was to follow the data to get to the right outcome—both with preclinical and clinical data,” says Weiss. “I always thought that made a lot of sense in marketing and communications to get to greater precision and accuracy. That was the dawn of personalized precision medicine, and I thought we should apply a similar concept to what I call precision marketing and communication.”
According to Weiss, he questioned why pharma marketing was hitting everyone with the same messaging, regardless of the diverse needs of patient populations. Instead, he decided to create solutions that were precise and targeted, using a concept he says is commonly used in consumer-packaged goods and other industries. It had yet to be applied to healthcare, however, due to privacy concerns.
“What we learned was you could follow social media behavior,” he says. “It was fine that it was anonymous. You didn’t have to know who the person was, but by seeing what they clicked on or where they searched, you could begin to pick up patterns and begin to target certain sets of the population. Then I started to look for technologies and approaches that we could incorporate and leverage to be more precise in our communications and make the clients’ dollars go further.”
The integration of AI
One of the things that Weiss has seen over his career is that it can be difficult for people to enter into the pharmaceutical arena from other industries. While noting such transitions don’t always work out, he says that he welcomes the outside perspective.
“People coming into the pharmaceutical world are super helpful, but it doesn’t always work,” Weiss adds. “Folks from consumer-packaged goods end up not loving it, because it’s harder to be creative in pharma. It’s highly regulated, every word is parsed and picked through. I’ve had issues over the years hiring the most wildly creative people who were doing tech or sports creative. I’d ask them if there was a way to make healthcare as sexy and interesting as marketing sneakers. I believe you can, but I don’t think it’s easy.”
As a wave of new products in weight loss, longevity, memory, and cosmetics hit the market today, Weiss believes that this will create more opportunity for creatives to go further in the industry. According to the executive, the growth in these areas opens pharma up to more avenues for innovative approaches to marketing. There’s also the emerging trend of influencer and celebrity messaging. These are areas where Weiss believes pharma can learn lessons from the consumer-packaged goods, technology, and other industries.
The big question everyone working in pharma—whether in a creative field or not—is asking at the moment is: How far will the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) advance?
“AI might speed up target identification and the like, but that’s machine learning that we’ve been doing for a long time,” Weiss tells Pharm Exec. “I don’t know that AI will completely change R&D, particularly the research part. However, AI can be useful in drug development because it allows us to target patients more effectively. We’ll be able to enroll trials faster and more efficiently. I do think there’s a role for AI in our world to make a lot of our tasks easier.
“We can write a little faster and maybe a little more accurately over time, but you need the human touch. That is what I’ve been trying to put together for years. It can’t be tech alone,” Weiss continues. “I always still say it’s garbage in, garbage out. With AI, the data sources have to be awesome. We must query it really smartly. I do think there is some creative and communication that will be sped up and will proliferate further and faster. We must be careful that it’s all still accurate and ensure the information is something you can take to the bank.”
Ultimately, AI is a technology that Weiss believes has its place in the biopharma ecosystem. He can see it being useful in areas such as supply-chain management and in his work with marketing and promotion. AI-driven tools have the potential to make jobs easier and more efficient, but Weiss doesn’t see it replacing people when it’s time to be creative.
‘Real’-world mission
At Real Chemistry, Weiss says the company champions a three-pronged construct: people, purpose, and performance.
“I don’t think you can get to performance unless you have great people executing well who are all aligned around a purpose and a reason for being,” he explains. “I’ve never seen it work terrifically well if everyone’s working at cross-purposes and don’t all share a vision. Our purpose and reason for being is to make the world a healthier place. That really hits home because I’ve had many family and friends, most recently my own wife, be diagnosed with a serious disease.”
This is a purpose and mission that Weiss has had throughout his career. He believes that if the healthcare industry communicates well, the people relying on it accumulate a better understanding and, in turn, greater access. While there isn’t, of course, a cure-all out there for everyone, better communication informs people on what is available for them, whether it’s an experimental treatment that’s still in clinical trials, or just treatments to ease their symptoms.
“Understanding your disease and learning about it gives you more freedom of choice as to what you do about it. We want to see people getting treated sooner,” Weiss tells Pharm Exec. “I definitely think prevention is going to be a big area of the future of medicine. Preventing events is much better than ending up in the healthcare system, which is really hard to navigate.”
For Weiss, the key to making the world a healthier place is to hire really good people who can communicate creatively and use technology to be more precise, accurate, and faster to get more done and have more reach. He also notes the importance of ensuring that individuals have a positive experience at work.
“I always say people come to and leave companies primarily for their bosses,” he says. “We can sit here and talk about tech, data, and all the rest, but ultimately, I think people always like a place because of the people they’re working with.”
Applying perspective
Since childhood, Weiss has been learning lessons that shaped his career as an entrepreneur. For him, success is about showing up and playing hard, and he has learned to make the distinction between playing to win versus just playing not to lose.
“Back when I was about 12 years-old, I was competing in a sport. One of the moms came up to me and said something along the lines of, ‘it’s really just about doing your best, not only about winning,’” Weiss recalls.“As long as you’re playing hard and giving it your all, that’s winning.”
He continues: “You can’t cave to what is ahead of you. I absolutely think that served me in the long run. When you’re building a company from zero to 2,500 people, which I’ve done over the years, you can’t let obstacles deter you from going forward. You must have this relentless pursuit of wanting to be the best in the field. I always wanted to be excellent for the client and do right
by them.”
Weiss also picked up many of the key lessons to being an entrepreneur from his parents while growing up.
“I watched my mom in the ’70s, ’80s, and ‘90s helping my grandfather run and then taking over a small oil distributorship in a rural town,” he tells Pharm Exec. “It was different for someone at that stage of life, coming out of Barnard College (in New York City), settling in a small town, and raising kids. I learned a lot from seeing how she operated within that environment.”
Weiss’s father was an entrepreneur himself, running his own optometry practice with multiple offices.
“I saw him taking care of patients and operating in a key area of healthcare,” he says. “I saw my parents run not just their own businesses, but also their own destinies; that was definitely a lesson that I took with me and thought about as I got into my own entrepreneurial journey.”
Jim Weiss: At a Glance
