PHIL INJE CHANG
Mr. Chang is an entrepreneur and marketing executive from Silicon Valley with proven successes in a wide range of software application areas, including CAD, 3D design, multimedia, email, e-commerce, and financial risk management. His 19-year experience in high tech also spans diverse industries, including telecommunications and energy. By focusing on the usefulness of technology and its paradigm-shifting potential, he has contributed to novel product design and significant business growth in the adoption of new products and services.
While at AT&T in the mid-nineties, he merged Silicon Valley attitudes with the traditional outlook of one of America's most established institutions. Among other achievements, he helped a division of the company involved in interactive TV to become a high-end web hosting service for clients like 800-Flowers and Toys R Us, and then co-founded the company's first e-commerce service, SecureBuy. He also witnessed firsthand many facets of Bell Labs before it was dismantled, and studied the pitfalls of large corporations in commercialising R&D.
Before moving to the UK in 2002, for six years he headed a software company in San Francisco that developed the most accurate analytical models possible for the price behaviour of electricity, the most volatile commodity in existence, and grew the company to $6 million in revenue, 50 employees and 30 major energy companies as customers. For Shell Trading he lead the development of one of the first ASP applications, a web-delivered analytical tool and data service built on early versions of server-side Java.
Mr. Chang's first venture began at the age of 16, a magazine of the arts that achieved a degree of notoriety at his conservative east coast prep school and that he continued to publish while attending the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied humanities and neurobiology. In 1984 he used the first Macintosh to desktop publish the magazine, and soon began explaining the inner workings of desktop technology to designers as editor of showpage, a magazine that unleashed the power of PostScript (the printer description language that established Adobe as a company). He wrote the first published review of Adobe Illustrator and contributed to early issues of MacUser, MacWEEK and other computer trade journals.
He began his career in the software industry by helping a Hungarian CAD developer learn the mores of American marketing. In addition to overcoming the resistance of architects to new technology, he educated the company in the culture of the US while being mentored by a retired sales veteran of Hewlett Packard. From there he worked for software developers like Paracomp, developer of the leading 3D design tool on the Macintosh, which merged with MacroMind to become Macromedia, and StarNine, a developer of email gateways that connected early LAN-based email systems to the Internet.
Because of his range of experience in companies of all sizes and stages of growth, and in a variety of markets and industries, he is available to help innovative companies at any stage as an advisor, executive, or non-executive director.
He also plays electric violin semi-professionally and writes frequently about his cross-cultural observations, some examples of which can be found on this site.
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