James Phillips is Co-Founder and Chief Strategist at NorthScale. He co-founded his first startup, Fifth Generation Systems, in 1984. The company eas acquired in 1993 by Symantec to form its PC backup software business. Most recently, he was co-founder and CEO of Akimbi Systems, acquired by VMware in 2006. He has held leadership roles at Intel, Synopsys, Intuit and a number of software startups.