Phil Black
Phil has dedicated his professional life to the venture capital industry, and True embodies many of the best management practices and investment principles gathered from his 18-year career.
Historically, Phil has invested in great entrepreneurs with great ideas, which has created track record of success in the communication/networking, enterprise and internet software markets.
In 2003, he founded Blacksmith Capital, a seed and early stage venture fund focused on sub $1 million investments in the technology sector. John Burke, another True partner, co-founded Blacksmith with Phil, and together they built a very successful “angel” fund. The many lessons from Blacksmith include the importance of team, the remarkable power of capital efficiency, and the overarching lesson that sometimes, less is more. The experience and discipline that Phil honed at Blacksmith is a critical asset to True.
Prior to founding Blacksmith, Phil was a General Partner at ABS Ventures where he first met John Burke in 1999. He also served as a General Partner at San Francisco’s Weiss, Peck & Greer Venture Partners (now Lightspeed Venture Partners) from 1995 to 1999.
Phil’s auspicious beginning in the venture industry occurred in 1988 when he began at Summit Partners (hat tip to Greg Avis), originally as an Associate and then as a Senior Associate. Phil and Jon Callaghan first worked together at Summit, and their four years of shared work experience were critical to the formation of True ten years later.
Phil has served on the board of directors of over 20 private and public companies and is currently a director of Automattic, Apacheta Corporation, and Kurtosys.
Degree
AB degree in Economics, Stanford University
True Story
I like to joke that, as a venture capitalist, you don’t know if you are any good at this business until one day you just are. The turning point is usually a really successful investment exit that you “own” outright. I had had my share of success up to this point, but there was something about my Telogy Networks experience beginning in 1997 that changed me.
These were the earliest days of Voice over IP, and they had some fundamental technology that allowed a VoIP connection to occur. I was proud to be associated with the senior team there, and I helped recruit some of those senior managers. I was also vociferous about paring their three lines of business down to one. We went from being okay in our three business lines to being really great at one – Voice over Internet Protocol. It paid off in spades, and I can’t stress enough to my portfolio CEOs that you only have to do one thing really well in the beginning to have a wildly successful company.
There are some great stories from that era, but in the end, the CEO delivered on the promise of VoIP to customers, the company was the picture of equity efficiency, and the head of sales had tremendous charisma with great results (hat tips to Joe Crupi and Phillip Swan, respectively).
Ultimately, even though Texas Instruments acquired Telogy after only two years from my investment date, I have been reaping the rewards of that success for over nine years now, as I have worked with many of those managers and investors (Jack Biddle and Roger Novak especially) on multiple other investment opportunities since that time.