ASE Speaker

Phil Wickham, 43, is the Managing Director of Hill Capital Investors, and has over 18 years of experience in information technology, materials and life sciences venture capital.

Prior to HCI, he was the U.S. Managing Director and Board Director of Copan, Inc., a Munich-based venture capital firm. There he launched, staffed and ran the Silicon Valley operations and led or co-led investments in Ikanos (public), Butterfly.net (now Emergent) and Radiance.

Prior to Copan, he was a Co-Founder and Managing Director of Profile Venture Partners, $50 M Philadelphia-based early stage software and services fund that specifically built channels into the global financial services industry. There he led investments in S2 Technologies and India-based eXL Services (acq: Conseco). During his tenure, he also launched the fund's Silicon Valley office.

Prior to Profile, Phil was a General Partner with JAFCO America Ventures U.S. Information Technology Fund II in their Palo Alto office, the U.S-based IT investment arm of $20 Billion JAFCO, Co. Ltd. in Japan. There he focused on software and semiconductors. While at JAFCO, he led or co-led over 18 investments including Com21 (public), Lightspan Partnership (public), Calimetrics (acq: LSI), think3 and NetPerceptions (public). He also led business development efforts in Asia on behalf of many of these companies. 

In 1995, he was selected as a Charter Class member of the Kauffman Fellows Program, a two-year post-graduate Fellowship and venture capital practicum funded by the $2 Billion Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City. He completed his Fellowship at Flagship Ventures in Boston, a leading genomics, life sciences and IT investor. His investment work there focused on medical devices, software and biopharma.

Prior to his career in venture capital, Phil spent several years in the educational and technology publishing industry. He founded Reference Media in Tokyo in 1989 and later sold the company to the Princeton Review of Japan, for whom he served as VP of Sales and Marketing in Japan for over two years. He also served as Managing Editor and COO of Atlanta-based Communications. 

Phil holds a BS from the Aerospace Mechanical Engineering School at the University of Arizona (1987), and was awarded the 1998 Anheiser-Busch Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University’s Eller Center for Entrepreneurship. He holds an MBA (with honors) from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was the Klein Fellow in Entrepreneurship, and in 1994 published technology transfer research on the history of the Institute's pioneering technology incubator.

He is a founding board member of the Center for Venture Education, the 501-c(3) Public Charity that now oversees the Kauffman Fellows Program since its spin-out from the Kauffman Foundation. He also serves as a board member of S2 Technologies, SVASE and is a Strategic Advisor to Creandum, a leading early-stage investor based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Phil speaks native English and is conversant in Japanese. His interests include golf, mountain biking, red wine, history and antique maps. Phil is married with two daughters, and resides in Los Gatos, CA.