Ashoka
Philippe (Phil) Villers is an entrepreneur, philanthropist and healthcare advocate. With a background in mechanical engineering, he founded three technology companies, including Computervision Corporation, which for years was a Fortune 500 company. In 1981, he and his wife, Kate, founded Families USA, formerly known as The Villers Foundation. Families USA is dedicated to achieving high-quality, affordable healthcare and improved health for all and played a significant role in the passing of the Affordable Care Act. Phil Villers is a member of the Entrepreneur-to-Entrepreneur Network has been a member of the Ashoka community for more than thirty years.
The Entrepreneur
Phil’s entrepreneurial journey has been shaped by his background as an engineer and his clear vision for the future of technology. Phil founded Computervision in 1969, after having worked at General Electric, Perkin Elmer, Barnes Engineering, the Link Division of Singer-General Precision, and Concord Control. Realizing his limited managerial experience, Phil brought on Marty Allen, his former manager at Link, as Computervision’s President, while he became Senior Vice President and focused on the company’s operations and product development.
Computervision’s goal was to produce innovative computer-aided design (CAD) software, which would enable engineers to design products without relying exclusively on drawing by hand. Their CAD software was one of the first examples of this type of technology. Engineers and designers still use CAD software today to make the process of designing more streamlined and more accessible.
Before the launch of Computervision’s CAD software, they put out several other technology products to bring in revenue, including a tool for the semiconductor industry that Phil designed himself. Once the software was launched, Computervision became a powerhouse in this space. It was the world’s leader in CAD technology for much of the 1970s and 1980s, with 35-40% market share at some points, ultimately becoming a Fortune 500 company. Phil provided much of the company’s strategic vision as the technology it produced evolved. He was also instrumental in bringing on an exceptionally capable team to do this work, including Sam Geisberg, who would go on to found Parametric Technology Corporation, a later trailblazer in the CAD space.
Phil left Computervision in 1981 to pursue new ideas in the rapidly developing technology space. He used his early sense of the importance of new technologies to found two additional companies. Automatix was an early robotics company, selling the first industrial robots with built-in machine vision, another branch of technology that has evolved and remains important today. His other company, Cognition, developed and sold design software for mechanical engineers.
He also became president of GrainPro, a “not-just-for-profit" mission-driven company that produces storage solutions for agricultural crops, including coffee and maize. GrainPro’s products prevent crop loss due to oxidation, mold, pests, and other hardships, increasing the income of small farmers and producers and reducing food loss and global hunger. They operate in 115 countries all over the world.
The Vision
Phil’s founding of Computervision was inspired in part by a sermon given at his church in Concord, Massachusetts in the wake of Martin Luther King’s death. Phil realized he was nearly the same age as Martin Luther King and if he wanted to act on his social conscience he needed to get started soon. He founded Computervision and his subsequent companies with a commitment to use the resources and influence he gained from this work to make change.
Phil’s original goal was to improve the quality of elders’ lives, opposing the idea that seniors should be consigned to their rocking chairs and not allowed to continue to make a difference in the world. Upon speaking with stakeholders, he found that a primary concern for a lot of seniors was access to and quality of healthcare. He ultimately pivoted, co-founding The Villers Foundation (which would later be called Families USA) with his wife, Kate. They endowed the foundation with $40 million and the goal of improving healthcare access and outcomes for all Americans.
Phil was heavily involved in both the Clinton Administration’s attempts to reform healthcare and in the Obama Administration’s successful passage of the Affordable Care Act. He credits the success of the ACA to coalition-building with other organizations and stakeholders with the same goal. Families USA played a leading role in forming the pivotal group Health Coverage Coalition for the Uninsured, which advocated for expanding insurance coverage, especially for children. They worked with groups like AARP, the American Medical Association, health insurance and healthcare companies as well as the American Academy of Family Physicians. Phil believes that partnerships and collaboration are essential to large-scale policy change, particularly when money is involved.
In the aftermath of the Affordable Care Act there is still a lot of work to do to build an equitable and effective healthcare system. Families USA now focuses on a number of policy priorities, including efficient and equitable healthcare, comprehensive health insurance coverage, and quality of patient experience. They are also working to support areas of healthcare not traditionally covered by health insurance, including dental care and mental health care. As the landscape evolves, Phil expects Families USA to keep pushing the envelope on healthcare accessibility, affordability, and quality far into the future.
The Person
Phil and his family left France when he was five years old, merely hours before the Nazi army arrived. After spending some time in Canada, he lived with his family in New York, where his father was a professor at Columbia. He received a BA with honors from Harvard and a MS in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. He has always considered himself a human rights advocate, in part because of early exposure to the grim realities of segregation when he traveled through the South. In high school, he once gave a speech about the benefits of FDR's New Deal, a highly controversial position at his conservative private school.
In the 1980s, Phil met Bill Drayton and learned about Ashoka. He was intimately familiar with conventional entrepreneurship and saw the power in the idea of social entrepreneurship and in Ashoka’s mission to bolster and connect these social entrepreneurs. He traveled to Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa to meet Ashoka Fellows and was particularly struck by a Fellow working on electrification in Brazil, who shared his background in engineering. He later shared that Fellow’s innovations with another Fellow working in South Africa, building connections among the Ashoka family
Phil co-founded Families USA with his wife, Kate Villers, who served as the organization’s Executive Director for several years. One of their daughters, Renata, is a social entrepreneur working in Costa Rica on children's literacy. Phil has served on the ACLU President’s Committee as well as Amnesty International USA’s Executive Directors Council. Phil is still active on numerous boards, including the Concord chapter of Indivisible and Concord for Ukraine.