Geoffrey Moore

Geoffrey Moore is an author, a speaker, and an advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolios and established high-tech enterprises, most recently including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5, Gainsight, Google, and Splunk.

Moore’s lifework has focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, focuses on the challenges start-up companies face transitioning from early adopting to mainstream customers. It has sold more than a million copies, and its third edition has been revised such that the majority of its examples and case studies reference companies that have come to prominence in the last decade. Moore’s latest business-related work, Zone to Win, addresses the challenge large enterprises face when embracing disruptive innovations, even when it is in their best interests to do so. It’s time to stop explaining why they don’t and start explaining how they can. This has been the basis of much of his recent consulting.

In a significant departure from Moore’s lifetime of business-related consulting, he uses his expertise in creating frameworks and applies it to the meaning of life itself and the big question: “What is going on?” His latest book, The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality, offers readers a complete look at how the universe has evolved and our ethical place within it. As Moore says in the book, “Our core sense of good and bad does not come from above. It is neither transcendent nor divine. Rather, it is inherent in our mammalian upbringing.”

Irish by heritage, Moore has yet to meet a microphone he didn’t like and gives between 50 and 80 speeches a year. One theme that has received a lot of attention recently is the transition in enterprise IT investment focus from systems of record to systems of engagement. This is driving the deployment of a new cloud infrastructure to complement the legacy client-server stack, creating massive markets for a next generation of tech-industry leaders.

Moore has a bachelor’s in American literature from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Washington. After teaching English for four years at Olivet College, he came back to the Bay Area with his wife and family and began a career in high tech as a training specialist. Over time, he transitioned first into sales and then into marketing, finally finding his niche in marketing consulting working first at Regis McKenna, Inc., then with the three firms he helped found: The Chasm Group, Chasm Institute, and TCG Advisors. Today he is chairman emeritus of all three.