Met through Scott Sandell's first NEA days; the strategy and project-management engagement at Actional, long before Power BI and the fifteen-thousand-person group
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jonathan Hare met James Phillips through Scott Sandell, when Sandell had just started at NEA — Sandell and Doug Ayer of ICP invested in Actional, the web-services and XML-management startup where Phillips was SVP of Products and Marketing, and Hare did a strategy and project-management project for him there in the early 2000s. That is the direct thread, and it predates everything Phillips is now known for.
The public career since, from the documented record: a self-taught developer who co-founded Fifth Generation Systems at seventeen (acquired by Symantec) and banked technology at UBS PaineWebber; after Actional, co-founder of Akimbi (acquired by VMware) and of Couchbase, which he led as CEO; then the Microsoft decade — joining in 2012 as strategy advisor to Satya Nadella, building and launching Power BI as the first major product of Nadella's CEO tenure, and rising by 2020 to President of the Digital Transformation Platform Group, scaled from 300 people to more than 15,000 across Dynamics 365, the Power Platform and Azure's AI, data and IoT stacks, delivering over $20 billion in annual revenue. A one-month presidency at Stripe, then Google Cloud as VP and advisor to Thomas Kurian, with a strategic directorship at Madrona and the F5 board alongside. The record notes the arc for the reason it notes such arcs: the person Hare worked with at a venture-backed startup became one of the operators of the enterprise-platform world this architecture addresses — and the one-degree paths, as ever, are the network.
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Backed by Scott Sandell at NEA and Doug Ayer at ICP; James Phillips ran products; Hare ran a strategy and project-management engagement; Progress Software eventually acquired it
Open →introduced to Hare byTold Hare to camp somewhere else
Open →commissioned the strategy project fromConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
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