Name: Wendy DiCicco
Position: CFO of Nuron Biotech, a rapidly growing biotechnology company that develops vaccines and biologics for neurodegenerative and infectious diseases. Nuron has doubled in size since last year, from 18 to 36 employees.
Previous Positions: Business consultant at The Campbell Cos., an orthopedic medical product manufacturer; CFO at Quench USA, a private purified-water provider; CFO at Globus Medical, a spinal-implant developer and manufacturer; CFO at Kensey Nash, a medical device, regenerative medicine, and biotechnology company
Notable For: A long history as finance chief in the biotechnology and medical-device industries.
Her Take-Away: Since we’re a very quickly growing start-up, I’m far less focused on the traditional role of a finance person and much more focused on things like our growth path and infrastructure change. My daily job, really, is figuring out how we are going to grow appropriately, and what we need to do to make sure that happens without the wheels falling off. When I came on in April, what I saw was that we needed policies, procedures, and professional service providers that could service an organization growing as fast as we are. We had almost no written policies; we’d go to human resources and say, “We don’t have a stock-option-granting policy. How do we want to handle this?” It could have been a policy about anything: accounting, expense reporting and approval, the monthly close, accounts payable. It could have been a handbook. It was everything.