Phillip Leslie

Phillip Leslie is CEO of RIVS Digital Interviews, a Chicago-based B2B SaaS company that improves the quality and pace of job interviews for the benefit of both the employer and the candidate. His expertise is in growing early-stage B2B companies from pre-revenue through eight-digit annual recurring revenue, via organic growth and accretive acquisitions. Phillip has especially deep experience growing Software as a Service firms and professionalizing sales and marketing processes optimized for favorable LTV:CAC.

Prior to his work at RIVS, he worked as Chief Innovation Officer at The Neat Company, leading teams responsible for commercializing machine learning and computer vision innovations to derive actionable metadata from scanned and photographed documents. Phillip arrived at Neat via the acquisition of ProOnGo LLC, a company that he grew out of Chicago Booth’s New Venture Challenge in 2008 and founded in the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. Prior experience included work on early smartphone products at Microsoft.

Phillip believes that early-stage B2B companies disproportionately fail to leverage empirical evidence from customer usage and consumption patterns and win-loss debriefs, thereby missing key opportunities to improve product adoption and growth. Much of Phillip’s professional work in growing B2B companies has been driven by the mindset that customer behavior unlocks the mystery of how to iterate on the product as well as the sales and marketing strategy.

Leslie earned a BS in computer science from Purdue University and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. While at Booth, he was the recipient of the Vijay and Sita Vashee Promising Entrepreneur Award.

Outside of work, Phil enjoys experimenting with 3D printing and robotics projects, and keeping up with his children’s many activities. He resides in the Chicago area with his wife Rebecca and children Ethan and Amelia.