Phil Wickham
Phil holds a BS from the Aerospace Mechanical Engineering School at the University of Arizona, and an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Phil Wickham is a Co-founder of Sozo Ventures along with Koh Nakamura (Kauffman Class 12). In addition to Sozo, Mr. Wickham is the emeritus CEO and Chairman of the Kauffman Fellows. Phil is a veteran investor, entrepreneur and teacher. He has shepherded more than 60 investments over his career, including Ikanos, Web Methods, Com21, Square, Twitter, Palantir, ServiceMax, Coinbase, Fastly, Flexport, Neurotrack, CircleUp, MongoDB, Zoom, Chorus.ai, Chainalysis, Grammarly, Metagenomi, Need, Sword, Viz.ai and Revinate. Mr. Wickham currently serves as an advisor to Kauffman-founded Angular Ventures (London), MaC Ventures (LA) and Taro Ventures (Tokyo). He is an emeritus advisor to the Creandum Fund in Stockholm. Phil entered the Kauffman Fellows in 1995 as a Charter Class member. In 2001, he co-created the original independent board of the soon to be spun-out Center for Venture Education (driven by the leadership of Trish Costello (CEO) and Jason Green (Charter Class - Chair)). In 2008, he took the role of CEO, relinquishing it to Jeff Harbach (Kauffman Class 16) eight years later in 2016, From there Phil served as chair until 2020. In Phil’s initial board and CEO role, he expanded the program into more than 40 countries and quadrupled both its operating budget and membership of the Kauffman Fellows Society. He created a multi-lingual book publishing arm, an annual research journal and the online Kauffman Fellows Academy. He also helped to conceive, staff and seed-fund TrueBridge Capital Partners, a $1.5 billion family of strategic fund-of-funds based in North Carolina. In 2012, he co-launched the CPIN collaboration between Japan’s Ministry of Economy and the Kauffman Fellows Program with endorsement by the US Embassy. Mr. Wickham is a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Engineering - where he and Koh funded the Center for Human Capital Formation - and a Visiting Professor at Waseda University’s School of Commerce, where he teaches original courses on innovation and capital formation. He was the lead Faculty for the Development Bank of Canada’s GP Academy Charter Class under the leadership of Ela Borenstein (Fellows Class 17). He is also a regular columnist for the Nihon Keizai Shinbun Newspicks, and has written for Forbes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, CNBC and the Straits Times. In 2022, he co-authored a #1 best-seller in Japan. He is just almost sort of wrapping up his second book. He is thrilled to support Fernando Fabre (Kauffman Class 14) as our new CEO.
A Charter Class member of the Kauffman Fellows Program Phil served his fellowship at OneLiberty/Flagship Ventures in Boston with mentor Ed Kania. He served as mentor to Israel Rollins and Yinglan Tan (Class 15), as well as Ray Hatoyama (Class 22).
Phil played a key role in the program's successful spin-out from the Kauffman Foundation, and was a founding board member of Kauffman Fellows. In 2016, he was given the organization's first-ever Lifetime Achievement Award.
Mentees:
SC Moatti, Class 25
Rob Barbara, Class 24
Code Cubitt, Class 25