Founder and CEO
Phyl is the founder and CEO of Collaborative Gain, which 20 years ago pioneered bringing councils to senior product leaders and GMs in Silicon Valley.
Phyl Terry, Founder and CEO of Collaborative Gain (CG), is the author of Never Search Alone, and Customers Included.
Phyl launched CG’s flagship leadership program – The Councils – in 2002 with a fellow group of Internet pioneers from Amazon, Google, and others. Thousands of leaders from the Internet world have come together in the last 20 years to learn the art of asking for help and to support each other to build better, more customer-centric products, services, companies, and careers (see their testimonials).
That’s their day job—in addition to that, Phyl runs a free global community for job seekers based on their latest book, Never Search Alone (and several other pro-bono programs – see below).
Previously, Phyl was on the team of the first company Amazon acquired back in the ’90s and then was CEO of pioneering product consulting firm Creative Good, with companies like Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft as customers.
Phyl also co-authored Customers Included, the book widely praised for its practical and passionate focus on building better businesses, and wrote a chapter in the Warren Buffett Shareholder (see their previous HBR article and TEDx talk).
As a speaker, Phyl has given hundreds of keynotes and featured talks at events like the Harvard Business School Distinguished Speaker Series, National Retail Federation conferences, Forbes, Inc. Magazine, TEDx and for private corporations such as Apple, American Express, eBay, Fidelity, Google, Intuit, Walmart, and many others. See a list of companies and conferences where they have spoken (and some testimonials and a 3 minute video). Phyl has been profiled and quoted extensively in publications like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times and named by Fast Company as one of the Fast Company 100 – 100 leaders shaping the 21st century.
A graduate of the Harvard Business School, Phyl also founded and runs four pro-bono programs – Slow Art Day, Reading Odyssey, the World of Business Reading Group (inspired by the writings of Warren Buffett), and the Never Search Alone community.
Phyl lives in Brooklyn, identifies as non-binary, and welcomes any and all pronouns.