Philip Soffer

VP of Product Development

As Vice President of Product Development, Philip oversees product management and core development of Lithium's expanding product line. He joins Lithium after nearly seven years at Plumtree Software (now a part of BEA Systems), where he was instrumental in defining the requirements for packaged enterprise portal software, helping to launch a multi-billion dollar market. Plumtree's flagship product, the Plumtree Corporate Portal, won several "product of the year" awards and positioned the company as a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant. Philip worked with enterprise customers such as Pratt & Whitney, Starbucks, and Procter & Gamble to build out Plumtree's product line to include portal, search, collaboration, content management, and developer tools products, growing revenue to over $80 million per year.

Philip graduated summa cum laude from Cornell University with a degree in history. He also holds a Master's from the University of California, Berkeley.

A. I'm dating myself here, but in 1983 I had an Apple //e with an Apple-Cat II modem (1200 baud, half duplex!), and I used to dial into bulletin boards. Back in those days the talk was mostly about hacking the phone network and trading warez. I eventually became a SysOp (the pre-cursor to a moderator) of a local BBS, and did the customization work myself. It even became a way to make friends off-line. In college and grad school I spent a fair amount of time with Usenet groups for TV shows (alt.tv.startrek.* anyone?), politics, and history.

A. I'm pretty active on Flickr, LinkedIn, del.ici.ous, Geni, Wikipedia, and several of our clients' sites. Lately, however, I've become addicted to Facebook. I came to check out the API and now I can't get out. We signed my mother-in-law up over Thanksgiving weekend.