Board of Advisors
Steve Dance
Steve Dance has over thirty years experience in corporate finance, primarily in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. Most recently, he was senior vice president and chief financial officer for ViaCell, Inc., a biotechnology company, a position he held from January 2004 until August 2007. Mr. Dance led the initial public offering for ViaCell in January 2005, raising over $60 million in cash. Prior to that, he spent five years as senior vice president and chief financial officer at SangStat Medical Corporation, a biotechnology company. At SangStat, he raised over $150 million in cash via public and private equity and loan financings and was a key member of the team that sold SangStat to Genzyme in September 2003. Previously, Mr. Dance spent one year with Plantronics, Inc., a telecommunications company, where he was responsible for worldwide financial accounting, reporting and planning activities. He spent fifteen years with Syntex Corporation, a pharmaceuticals company (later part of the Roche group), in a number of finance positions of increasing responsibility, including as controller of US sales, marketing and manufacturing operations, a division with over $1 billion in revenues. Other positions include seven years with Deloitte & Touche in London and San Francisco.
Mr. Dance holds CPA and FCA (UK equivalent) qualifications in accounting. He also holds a B.A. degree in French from the University of Leeds in England, and is fluent in both French and Spanish. He is currently a director of the National Initiative for Children’s Healthcare Quality, Inc. a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stephen M. Honig
Stephen M. Honig practices a broad spectrum of business law, with emphasis on corporate law and governance, securities law, mergers and acquisitions, and emerging businesses. Since the 1960s, his practice has included forming, building, reorganizing and advising on the governance of private companies and public companies and M&A transactions for public and private buyers and sellers both in the United States and overseas. He encourages a focus on critically evaluating the components of a given transaction, so as to minimize protracted negotiations in areas which are not value-added to the client.
Mr. Honig’s career has reflected the technological orientation of the New England area in which he has practiced, representing startups, emerging companies, and entities and individuals in technology transfer arrangements in many industries, including high energy physics; photo-voltaics; electronics; computer manufacturing; software; medical devices; pharmaceuticals; semi-conductor materials; circuit boards; online service providers; telecom infrastructure; e-commerce; and energy. Mr. Honig has served as president of an SEC-registered investment advisor, represented companies and underwriters in public offerings and private placements, represented broker-dealers and market makers, and effected the entry of banks into the securities business.
Over the years, Mr. Honig’s practice also has evolved into other areas. He now serves as trustee of family trusts and, in that capacity, evaluates and supervises the operation of businesses on behalf of the families whose wealth he manages. He also represents individual, institutional and venture capital investors in equity, debt and lease financings.
Mr. Honig has taught securities law and regularly lectures and writes on governance issues, shareholder disputes, middle market antitrust issues, securities law regulation, Sarbanes-Oxley, and the representation of senior executives engaged in establishing compensation regimes in both public and private company settings. Mr. Honig is a member of the National Association of Corporate Directors, the Securities Law Committees of the Boston and Massachusetts Bar Associations, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Enterprise Forum. As principal program director for the National Association of Corporate Directors in New England, he has designed and presented programs for directors and advisors to directors on matters of governance, director duties, boards in crisis, boards faced with regulatory issues, and the legal challenges facing directors under Delaware and federal securities laws. He is the regular securities law columnist for In-House (the Lawyers Weekly publication directed to in-house attorneys). He is a 1966 graduate of Harvard Law School and holds his undergraduate degree from Columbia College.
Gina LaRoche
Gina LaRoche is a founding partner of Seven Stones Leadership, a professional services firm advancing the practice of leadership, wisdom, courage and sufficiency. She leverages over 20 years of experience in delivering executive programs that have challenged leaders, teams and entrepreneurs to accelerate results using vision, strategy and accountability for execution.
Seven Stones was created to fulfill on the supposition that meaningful effective leadership requires the exposure of assumptions that guide organizations. Once uncovered, organizations can create a new set of beliefs, ones which if embraced and enacted would powerfully shift the company toward the mindset of sufficiency. The concept of Sufficiency asserts that there are enough resources to sustain all and a global economy based on these principles would be very different world in which to compete. We work with individuals, executives, teams and corporate systems who want to create a culture of trust, integrity and sustainability. Gina serves as a visiting faculty member for executive education programs at Simmons School of Management. She started her career as a sales professional at IBM where she received numerous excellence awards. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BSBA from Georgetown University. She is married and has two elementary age sons.
Ann M. Murray
Ms. Murray is an experienced business development, coach, management, & business executive with twenty-five+ years experience generating revenue from technology, business, and outsourcing (India & China) consulting services to financial services companies. She is Vice President of Solutions Business Development for Financial Services at Dextrys, in Wakefield, MA. ,P. Her experience spans working for large corporations such as Prime Computer, Digital Equipment Corporation, CDI Corporation, and Patni Computer Systems, to working for start-up consulting firms such as Innovative Information Systems, Concept Five Technologies (commercial spin-off of The Mitre Corporation), Granitar, The Reference, and DarwinSuzsoft, now known as Dextrys.
Ms. Murray’s business experience and earlier career as a psychologist combine her talents to make contributions to the following organizations:
- Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Member
- ACG Women’s Executive Forum, Planning Committee Member Commonwealth
Institute, Member - Harvard Club of Boston, Member
- Women of The Harvard Club: Planning Committee Member
- MS Cure Fund, Executive Steering Committee Member and VP of Corporate Development
- Boston Women in Finance, Board Member, Co-Chair Communications, and Member
- Simmons School of Management’s Business Plan Competition, Mentor
Ms. Murray’s academic credentials include:
- BA, Psychology, Millersville University of Pennsylvania, Millersville, PA
- MA and CAGS (Certificate, Advanced Graduate Study), Counseling Psychology, Assumption College, Worcester, MA.
