Ashoka
How many founders of Fortune 500 companies are driven from the start by a desire to do good? Philippe Villers founded Computervision, his industry-leading CAD company, in 1969 with the goal of using whatever money and influence he gained for social change. In 1981, he and his wife co-founded Families USA and endowed it with $40 million. Through this organization, Phil continues to advocate for health care access and was one of the driving forces behind the landmark Affordable Care Act. Phil has also been involved with Ashoka since the 1980s and is a member of our Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur (E2) Network.
In early 2024, Njideka Harry, Ashoka’s Leadership Group Member, Strategic Entrepreneurship Relationships, and leader of the E2 Network, spoke with Phil about the driving forces behind his entrepreneurship trajectory and changemaking journey.
Njideka: You moved to the United States when you were five years old, from France.
Phil: We had a good reason for moving—the German invasion of France. My father was in the French military, and he found out that the French army was going to blow up all the bridges across the Loire river. He called my aunt on a military line and told her that she should organize a family trip to go visit some friends in the Bordeaux region near the Spanish frontier in the next two hours, giving no explanation. The story about the bridges was a military secret. So we did exactly that, and we crossed the Spanish border two hours ahead of the German army.
When you ended up in the US, where did you go?
We didn’t have US visas, so we spent a month in Cuba and then some time in Montreal. After the war, we lived in New York. My father was a professor at Columbia. I came to Boston my freshman year at Harvard.
After Harvard, you studied mechanical engineering at M.I.T. You don’t see many engineers with a human rights and activism mindset. Where did that come from?
I view myself as a human rights advocate in the broadest sense of the word. As a boy I was already interested in human rights issues, a lot of them having to do with having traveled through the South and being horrified at what I saw. This was back in the days of full segregation.
In high school, all the seniors had to give a “Chapel Talk.” You could choose anything you wanted. I chose the New Deal and its accomplishments. It was not highly appreciated by a lot of the faculty. Like many private schools, mine was relatively conservative.
In April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and it caused you to reflect.
We had a powerful sermon preached in our church on his death and it occurred to me that he was only slightly older than I was then, and if I was going to do something about my ambitions, I’d better start. So that afternoon I did what you’d expect an engineer to do, I got out a pad of paper and considered my possibilities.
I could have quit my job and started from scratch, but that seemed daunting. The second option was to work in industry for a time and build up what I didn’t have, which was resources, management experience, et cetera. I chose the second course and in 1969 I started my first company, which became a Fortune 500 company in the field of Computer-Aided Design.
Take us back to the founding of Computervision. What problem were you trying to solve?
Two problems. First, I was a lousy draftsman. The old-fashioned way of designing products involved many draftsmen filling a big board with many drawings. Finding a better way was of interest. Also, I heard a pioneering PhD thesis on the subject of computer-aided design and was very impressed.
The company was co-founded with Marty Allen?
He was a former boss of mine. I was concerned with my lack of management experience, so I approached him and invited him to become president of the company and I would be senior vice president.
Interesting. You identified a gap that needed to be filled and brought on someone that you trusted.
I enjoy technology and I enjoy innovating. I have twelve or so patents. Computervision, for a time, was the world’s leader in Computer-Aided Design and a Fortune 500 company. Computer-Aided Design uses technology to support the process of reducing a concept or product to a written form. This means many drawings. How far could engineers get on their own in designing a product using computers to make it more efficient? That’s what we wanted to solve for.
You founded three technology companies and then became president of GrainPro, a company that builds crop storage solutions for small farmers, which seems like an unlikely next step.
I thought GrainPro was something the world needed that could be quite successful, so I invested in the company and then became president. I liked the idea that we could protect grains and other commodities from dangers like pests and mold, and drastically reduce food losses around the world in a cost-effective manner. From a values point of view that meant a lot to me. GrainPro is now in 115 countries. Our biggest financial success has been in the coffee industry. Coffee only grows once a year or twice a year in some climates, but people want to drink coffee year-round. We also have a significant United Nations market. They use GrainPro storage for disaster relief and combatting famine.
You said earlier that you became a business entrepreneur to gather resources to make social change, like the $40 million endowment you gave to your foundation, Families USA, then known as the Villers Foundation. When you founded Families USA in 1981, why was your focus on healthcare?
It evolved. We spent about nine months brainstorming. Originally, I gravitated towards making a difference to the role of seniors in our society. There's a “scrap heap” concept that seniors should sit in their rocking chair and not have an active part in the community. Doing something about that seemed very interesting. In the process of talking to a lot of seniors, however, it became obvious that a major preoccupation of older people is healthcare. We decided the emphasis of our work should be on ensuring quality, affordable healthcare for everybody in this country. We played a major role in successfully bringing about the Affordable Care Act. This is the area in which we made the biggest single difference.
That must have been a big moment. Did you have to redefine yourselves after that or were the next steps clear?
Somewhere in between. I call it a good down payment. It didn’t apply to everybody. Some states still don’t have it. It doesn’t cover everything. Mental care is pretty much left out. Dental care is also not covered. Some people look at health care and think it stops at the neck. We're playing an important role in changing that.
You always use the word “we” when describing your important role in passing the ACA.
When I say “we,” if you want to make change in this country of a major nature, particularly if it’s very expensive, you need to build coalitions. No one group can claim all the credit, including ourselves.
What other groups would you consider part of your coalition?
Many organizations touch one aspect or another of healthcare reform and we’ve worked with many of them. When we were working on the ACA we probably had a dozen partners. I view us not as being the health care reform movement, but part of the health care reform movement. I knew enough not to think we could do it alone. When you want to accomplish something that affects pretty much everybody in the country, no organization could do it alone.
What do you see as the future of Families USA?
For the US, the kind of health care system that has been achieved in much of Europe is still well in the future and I see Families USA playing an important role in that, well beyond my own lifetime.
Beyond your work as an entrepreneur and philanthropist, you've been part of the Ashoka ecosystem for a long time. How did you first encounter Ashoka?
I got a call from a gentleman by the name of Bill [Drayton, Ashoka's founder and CEO] and the more I listened the more I liked it. So I became an E2, an Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur, sometime in the eighties.
Why were you inspired to get involved?
I was very familiar with conventional entrepreneurship. I think Bill coined the term “social entrepreneurship” and put forth the idea that people who start something on a nonprofit basis can also change the world and should be assisted and supported to interact with one another.
Ashoka elects outstanding social entrepreneurs to its Fellowship program. You had an opportunity to interact with Fellows on the ground. What made them unique? What about their work interested you?
Yes, I went to Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa. All the Fellows I met were making a difference. In Brazil I met a man in the Amazon who set up a system of going around with packages of books in areas that might not even have roads to encourage reading. Another, which happened to fit my professional training, was the man I met in Brazil who invented a way to bring electrification to small farmers who didn’t have it. His approach was radical. I was so impressed with that, that when I went to South Africa, I connected people with this Fellow from Brazil.
What did you gain from this experience?
I learned how nonprofit entrepreneurship could grow and make a major difference. The quality of the entrepreneurs that I met with was very impressive. The Ashoka fellows I've met have been inspiring and I’ve been exposed to at least a dozen of them working in totally different areas. Part of the thing that makes it attractive is that you’re meeting people whose lives have been highly significant, not just in a business sense but in a social sense.
Why do you give to Ashoka?
For the same reason I did at the beginning. This is a unique attempt to create, expand, and publicize the field of nonprofit entrepreneurship and to help it succeed. That seems to me a social good. For me, the association with Ashoka, to which I've contributed for many years, is an inspiring one, because they have really brought to life the concept of non-commercial entrepreneurship having major social value. For those of us who have been successful in the for-profit field it’s an opportunity, and a significant one, to contribute to social progress.