James Phillips is an entrepreneur, executive, and 30-year software industry veteran. He currently serves on the board of directors for F5.
Journey to Madrona
In 2022 James retired from Microsoft after ten years with the company. From 2012 to 2022, his organization grew from 300 to over 15,000 team members spanning the globe and delivering over $20 billion in revenue annually. His teams built and operated a large portion of the Microsoft Cloud, including the Dynamics 365, Power Platform, Azure AI Platform, Azure Data Platform, Azure IoT Platform, and the Microsoft Cloud for <industry> product families.
During his decade at Microsoft, James drove the creation of many of the company’s most successful new products, including Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and the broader Power Platform, delivering billions of dollars of net new organic annual revenue. In addition to new product innovation, James led the turnaround of Microsoft’s business applications franchise, transforming a flat-lined, 4% growth, largely on-premises software business into the Dynamics 365 SaaS family, creating a multi-billion dollar, 30% annual revenue growth engine for the company.
Prior to Microsoft, Phillips was a serial entrepreneur, most recently as a founder and CEO of Akimbi Systems (acquired by VMware) and a co-founder at Couchbase (NASDAQ: BASE). He also held engineering, product management, corporate development, and marketing leadership roles at Intel, VMware, Progress, and Synopsys; and spent two years as a technology investment banker with UBS PaineWebber.
Lessons learned
- Focus. Very few startups die of hunger, but the road is littered with the carcasses of startups that died from indigestion. Lack of focus is the number one killer of any new business.
- Be decisive. The odds are very high that you will be wrong in some aspect of every decision. Deciding and moving forward will enable you to learn where you got it right and where you got it wrong. You won’t learn until you decide and move — and then you can adjust.
- Move fast. Speed kills … the competition. The faster you get in market, the faster you iterate, the faster you adjust, the faster you build your competitive moat, and the more distance you put between you and those who will inevitably fail to keep up.
When he’s not in the office…
James is an aspiring age-group bike racer and can be found most days on his indoor trainer, road, gravel, or mountain bikes. You can also frequently find him with his hands in the dirt in his greenhouse and overly ambitious vegetable garden.
Noteworthy
James began his career as a self-taught programmer and co-founded Fifth Generation Systems (acquired by Symantec) at age 17. He holds a bachelor’s in mathematics from Louisiana State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.