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Charles Phillips grew up moving. His father served in the Air Force, which meant the family relocated constantly, state to state, and sometimes to Europe. Phillips was the kid spending spare time building computers. It was not a hobby. It was a signal.
He enrolled at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, graduating in 1981 with a degree in computer science. Bad eyesight ended his pilot ambitions. He pivoted without hesitation, enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps and serving as a captain in the 2nd Battalion, 10th Marines at Camp Lejeune. Three generations of his family had served. He was not breaking tradition. He was adding to it.
After the Marines, Phillips pursued law at New York Law School and an MBA from Hampton University. Then Wall Street.
The Morgan Stanley Years
Phillips joined Morgan Stanley in 1994 as a managing director in the technology group. He became one of the most sought-after software analysts of the era, writing detailed reports on what the internet was doing to industry. His personal toll-free number, 1-800-MR-CHUCK, circulated among CEOs on cocktail napkins and business cards. He was an Institutional Investor All Star for 10 consecutive years. People wanted access to his thinking.
Larry Ellison was one of them. In 2003, Oracle's co-founder recruited Phillips to serve as co-president and director. Within six months, he had the title. Over the next eight years, Oracle tripled in size and market capitalization. Phillips oversaw nearly 300 percent revenue growth and drove 70 acquisitions, including PeopleSoft, BEA Systems, Siebel Systems and Hyperion Solutions. He became one of the most prominent African Americans in the technology industry.
He left Oracle in 2010.
Building Infor From the Ground Up
Two months later, he became CEO of Infor, the world's third largest enterprise software company. The firm was bloated, scattered and losing ground. Phillips moved its headquarters from suburban Atlanta to New York City, hired designers and engineers, and created Hook and Loop, an internal creative agency whose job was to make enterprise software actually look good. He was described as the Steve Jobs of business software, and the comparison was not entirely unfair.
Under his leadership, Infor became the first ERP vendor to move completely to the cloud. The company built 300 new products, hired 1,500 engineers and grew to 70 million subscribers on Amazon infrastructure. Koch Industries invested $2 billion in 2017, then $1.5 billion more in 2019. In 2020, Koch acquired Infor outright at a $13 billion valuation. It was the largest enterprise software exit of that period.
Phillips stepped back from the CEO role in 2019 and moved into the chairman seat. He then co-founded Recognize, a technology investment and operating firm now managing more than $3 billion in assets. The firm targets software engineering services companies and applies the same operational approach Phillips used to rebuild Infor.
He sits on the boards of Bloomberg LP, American Express, Compass, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Apollo Theater. He co-founded the Black Economic Alliance, a consortium of business leaders committed to economic growth in Black communities. He served on President Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board and on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The boy who built computers in spare rooms became the man who built a $13 billion company. He is still building.
