Silvio Silva experienced his sliding-doors moment a decade ago. He had spent the early years of his career in retail and office-operations jobs, but kept an eye on an eventual move into the marketing realm. And so it was that, on the same day in late 2015, he received three job offers, two in office roles similar to the ones he’d held previously and another with the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, for which he’d volunteered in the past.
It was the possibility of a fourth offer that tantalized him, as Silva had been in touch with a recruiter who dangled a marketing project manager role at AMAG Pharmaceuticals. Not one to sit back and wait for life to happen to him, Silva reached out to the recruiter and conveyed the urgency of his situation. The company extended its offer a few hours later, which he happily accepted.
“I think back to that day very often,” Silva says. “That was when work went from ‘work’ to ‘career.’”
Ten years later, Silva has earned a reputation as one of the few individuals truly elevating the marketing and CX functions within the HIV space. He’s done it by combining a veteran’s grasp of strategy with a deft personal touch that builds consensus.
“Silvio is deeply committed to our mission, which is ending HIV for everyone everywhere,” says Lisa Blizzard, executive director, HIV prevention customer experience marketing at Gilead, who characterizes him as a consumer champion. “He’s always making sure we’re viewing everything through a consumer lens. He pulls so many different groups and people together, which isn’t easy.”
Silva grew up in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay area without any particular career path in mind. He recalls a brief flirtation with acting before appearances in school productions cooled him on performing. A stint at junior college didn’t take, so Silva filled ground-floor jobs at The Gap and Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts.
He believes those early experiences shaped his ability to work alongside practically anyone. “Two of the best places to learn about people are at restaurants or in retail,” he notes. “I tend to get along well with other folks. You build those relationships and they want to work with you more.”
Before long Silva transitioned into office operations and management roles, spending two years as web product manager at a media company. “I learned what I learned while I was learning it,” he says with a shrug. It was around this time that he started to more seriously consider marketing as a professional pursuit, joining a small agency that handled some event-marketing business. The job lined up neatly with Silva’s personal enthusiasms: He jokingly bills himself as the “cruise director” for his group of friends, the person who coordinates dinner parties and manages the bulk of the planning for trips to Puerto Vallarta, Las Vegas and other destinations.
The agency work led Silva to a gig as brand manager at Stunr, a dating website aiming to compete with the Tinders and Grindrs of the world. He sensed from the outset, however, that the brand was doomed to fail.
“We were entering an incredibly saturated market and we hadn’t articulated what made us different. I kept saying, ‘This product does not stand out,’” he recalls.
Silva’s intuition proved correct, nudging him into the job search that ultimately landed him at AMAG. A decade later, he characterizes the move as a bit of a leap of faith, given his unfamiliarity with the business. But he knew what he didn’t know and eagerly dove into his first role with the company, managing a $10 million media program around its recently acquired Cord Blood Registry unit.
One of his colleagues, former AMAG SVP, head of women’s health sales and marketing Meg Rivera, remembers Silva as a quick study. “When I joined AMAG, the chief commercial officer told me, ‘There’s one guy on the team you’re really going to like,’ and that, of course, was Silvio,” she says. “He has the hustle and the grit and all the other things that you can’t coach, but he also radiates joy and light and energy. You ask anyone about Silvio and all you’re going to hear is how smart he is and how much they love him.”
It helped that Silva arrived at AMAG without any preconceptions about the business writ large. He was able to look at daunting challenges, like leveraging social media in a highly regulated industry, with fresh eyes.
With Rivera’s encouragement, Silva transitioned to a consumer-facing marketing role on the Vyleesi launch team. This was his “a-ha!” moment, the one that revealed a path forward. Which isn’t to say that he started to feel comfortable right away – or even ten years later.
“That moment of, ‘Oh, I get it now, I totally understand this business’ – I don’t think that will ever come,” he continues. “For me at least, there’s always something new to learn.”
The desire to expand his base of skills prompted Silva to depart AMAG. Silva had moved from San Francisco to Boston to work on the Vyleesi launch, but after four years with the company he was ready for something new. When a recruiter reached out about a community engagement and marketing post at Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Silva pounced. In his two years at Apellis, he and his team launched the unbranded This Is PNH website and enlisted people with PNH (paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, a rare blood disorder) to serve on an ongoing advisory board.
Silva was buoyed by working with members of the tight-knit community, even as he recognized the irony of his situation. “I mean, I was separated by literally an entire country from my own community,” he recalls with a wry laugh. Before long he and his husband chose to move back to San Francisco, setting up a telecommuting situation that proved unworkable. “It’s hard to do east-coast hours from the west coast.”
Silva briefly joined Ascendis Pharma in a digital communications role that, he says now, was a poor fit for him and the organization alike. When a marketing position in Gilead Sciences’ HIV prevention group opened up – the same position he had unsuccessfully pursued a few years earlier – Silva threw himself into the process.
“This was the place I wanted to be,” he says. “I was a kid in the 1980s when the AIDS epidemic started and I saw the impact firsthand… Gilead was always a prize for me, specifically because of the work we do in HIV.”
Three months and ten interviews later, Silva joined the organization as associate director, consumer marketing-HIV prevention, in June 2022. He quickly became a core member of the launch team for Yeztugo, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in June, and sought to fine-tune the company’s approach to PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis).
“In marketing you hear lots of jargon-y words like ‘authenticity’ and ‘engagement.’ None of them matter much unless you prove it through the work,” he says.
By way of example, Silva points to a program with dancer/actor/influencer Jason Rodriguez that sought to generate greater awareness of PrEP among Black and brown men, who experience higher rates of HIV infection than white men. The effort included a live dance event in New York City and a dance challenge on social media. It represented the first time Gilead had done influencer work on such a broad scale.
Silva’s decision to shift into a CX role in March was motivated by a desire to round out his skill set, especially in the realm of HCP engagement. “CX, at least when you do it right, sits squarely in the middle of DTC and HCP. There are ways to address pain points for both audiences at the same time,” he explains.
It doesn’t hurt that Gilead has traditionally prioritized CX, and understood that it needed to play a pivotal role in the Yeztugo launch. “Too many people think that CX equals UX, which isn’t right. UX is part of CX, but CX is the entire journey,” Silva says animatedly. “There are plenty of companies out there where CX doesn’t have a seat at every table, which is a sure-fire way to miss the human need for a given product.”
As for what comes next, Silva’s past and current managers believe that a leadership role is imminent. “He’s the kind of person who will lead with empathy and understanding, which you don’t get often enough,” Blizzard notes. Rivera agrees, adding, “Whoever puts Silvio in a position like that is going to be very, very happy they did. He has an uncanny ability to connect with all sorts of people, whether it’s patients or providers in his work or the people on his team.”
For his part, Silva hasn’t gazed too deeply into the crystal ball. Over the last few years, he has been pursuing his college degree in fits and starts; he has about a year of study still to go. He admits, however, that “it’s hard to make it my top priority when I’m working full-time.”
Beyond that, Silva is focusing on the here and now, devoting minimal energy to fretting over his next role or task. “I try to keep it pretty simple: I love working in this space and I want to grow in this organization,” he says. “Hopefully there will be opportunities to keep taking those leaps of faith.”
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