Can You Lead?
Will They Follow?

David K. Stone,
Founder, Managing Director, Liberty
Tree Advisors, LLC

Entrepreneurial organizations need leadership to succeed. Discussions about leadership often center on start-ups and small, growing companies, but leadership is essential to all organizations. Without leadership, enterprises flounder, unable to identify their goals and thus failing to achieve them. With demonstrated leadership, organizations can flourish.

Yet the fundamentals of leadership are difficult to identify as a discipline. In fact, leadership is often defined most clearly in hindsight. It's hard to appreciate what qualities make successful leaders until after a leader has been tested and proven worthy of the title.

The May 9 WPI Venture Forum speaker, David K. Stone, MBA, will select and dissect examples of leadership and leaders in the entrepreneurial world to demonstrate how business owners can be better prepared to recognize and value this success-driving activity.

Stone is the Founder and Managing Director of Liberty Tree Advisors, LLC, a consulting firm that helps emerging life sciences companies grow. He is also a Partner of Flagship Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on creating, financing, and building innovative companies in the life science and technology sectors. In addition, he is an independent director and Chairman of Oscient Pharmaceuticals, a commercial-stage biopharmaceutical company.

A veteran of Wall Street, Stone followed the biotechnology sector for nearly ten years at Cowen & Company, where he built a highly regarded research and investment banking practice. He began his career in biotechnology in 1983 as a Project Manager and later Communications Director at Genetics Institute (now part of Wyeth Pharmaceuticals). He earned a B.S. in Microbiology from Colorado State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.