Leslie co-founded[5][6]Veritas Technologies and served as its CEO.[7][8] During his tenure as Chairman and CEO,[9] the company grew from $0 to $1.5B in revenue and $400M in operating profit, was a top ten independent software company and achieved the distinction of becoming a Fortune 1000 company.[10][11]
Leslie started his career at IBM as a systems engineer, working on operating systems RAX. In 1967 as an IBM employee, he architected the first software hypervisor.[15] In 1969 he joined Scientific Data Systems (later Xerox Data Systems) as a systems engineer and in 1972 Data General as an account executive. He was promoted to district manager, regional manager and finally area director for western United States.
In 1980, Leslie founded his first company, Synapse Computer Systems. He served as CEO of the company, which designed and built high availability, multiprocessor transaction processing systems.[16] The company was not successful, and in 1984 he was recruited as CEO of Rugged Digital Systems. He served until the company’s sale in 1989. During this time the company revenues rose from $2M in revenue to 32M and became profitable. [citation needed]
Leslie lectured at the Stanford Graduate School of Business for twenty-one years. His work was focused on founding, growing and scaling companies. His work in technology lifecycles (Leslie's Law[19]), scaling of new products (Sales Learning Curve[20][21]), and go to market strategies (Leslie's Compass[22]), which is based on Leslie's own experience as the founder and CEO[23] became the foundations of Stanford courses,[24] especially his marquee work "The Sales Learning Curve"[25]
Philanthropy
In 2015 N.Y.U. opened doors to a 5,900-square-foot lab, financed by a multimillion-dollar gift from Leslie and his wife, Debra.[12]
^Leslie, Mark; Holloway, Charles A. (2006). "The Sales Learning Curve". Harvard Business Review. 84 (7–8). Harvard Business School: 114–23, 189. PMID16846194.