Phil Shawe has two parallel stories running at once. One is the familiar founder arc: bootstrapping TransPerfect from an NYU dorm room into a global language-and-AI platform with roughly $1.2 billion in annual revenue and 10,000 employees. The other is a political-legal crusade: a decade of trench warfare with Delaware’s Court of Chancery that pushed him to re-domicile in Nevada, relocate to Puerto Rico, bankroll reform efforts, and press a broader case that America’s most famous business court has lost the trust of entrepreneurs.
From forced sale to deal machine
After a bruising cofounder breakup, a court-ordered auction in 2016, and his 2018 buyout, Shawe didn’t hunker down—he went shopping. In the last eight months, TransPerfect has acquired nine companies—H2A, Technicolor Games, Apostroph Group, Bear Down Studios, Blu Digital Group, TheSpeech (Speech), MPC, The Mill Studios, and Unbabel—as part of a thesis that blends adjacency and diversification. The logic is simple: lean into categories where TransPerfect’s global customer base and tech stack can accelerate growth (media localization, VFX, real-time interpretation, data/AI), and keep the human talent that created the value in the first place.
“We don’t approach M&A like a private-equity clean-up,” Shawe has said. The preference is entrepreneurial management that stays on, products the current salesforce can actually sell, and rapid migration to TransPerfect’s own platforms (especially GlobalLink and its language tech) to avoid paying competitors for tools TransPerfect already builds. With production footprints across time zones, the company also treats acquisitions as a way to keep work moving “while the sun never sets.”
AI with guardrails
In an industry reshaped by machine translation, Shawe’s pitch stresses security and accuracy. GlobalLink automates content localization at scale; DataForce supplies the human-in-the-loop data pipelines that train specialized AI models; TransPerfect Connect handles over-the-phone interpretation; and eDiscovery extends the stack into legal services where confidentiality is existential. The aim is not to beat consumer MT on price, but to win on enterprise-grade privacy, workflow integration, and outcomes.
The Delaware reckoning
The TransPerfect saga also turned Shawe into an outspoken critic of Delaware’s chancery system. He argues the court voided his operating agreement, declared “deadlock,” seized control of a profitable firm, and then kept jurisdiction alive through interlocutory rulings—approving seven-figure quarterly fee bills years after the sale resolved. He backed Senate Bill 313, a first-step reform that checks the court’s ability to void contracts, and he has funded advocacy and political campaigns that press for transparency and restraint.
To Shawe, this is structural, not personal: a court marketed as predictable has, in his view, become personality-driven and activist, unnerving founders and private capital alike. Re-domiciling TransPerfect to Nevada in 2018 was both a legal strategy and a signal to peers that the Delaware halo can—and sometimes should—be questioned.
Growth with friction
TransPerfect’s ascent hasn’t been without critics. Class actions in New York and California allege wage/overtime and contractor-classification violations; Shawe disputes the claims, calling them fee-driven and vowing not to settle on principle. Meanwhile, the company’s pace—millions of words translated daily, hundreds of enterprise clients, and a buy-and-build cadence—has raised expectations. A recent Forbes analysis pegs TransPerfect’s value at roughly $1.8 billion—more than double its 2016 auction mark—while noting Shawe’s continued appetite to reinvest, his elevation of long-time operator Jin Lee to co-CEO, and a reported $200 million reserve for future deals.
The founder’s calculus
Read together, the threads form a coherent bet: pair founder-led businesses and “stay-on” executives with a platform that can actually sell their products, hard-wire them into a unified tech stack, and apply AI where it compounds human expertise and security, not where it commoditizes it. Then push for rule-of-law reforms that make contracts—not court personalities—the backbone of corporate outcomes.
Whether you see Shawe as a reformer, a relentless litigant, or a founder determined to control his own destiny, the scoreboard is visible: a bigger, more diversified TransPerfect, an acquisitive playbook that keeps talent in place, and a public challenge to Delaware’s once-unchallenged brand. If the state wants to remain America’s corporate capital, Shawe’s message is blunt: predictability and restraint aren’t optional—they’re the product.
