Robert "Bob" Young is an entrepreneur who made a fortune from Red Hat software. He was born in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada[1]. He attended Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. He received a Bachelor of the Arts from Victoria College at the University of Toronto.
He created the ACC Corporation which merged with Red Hat in 1995. From the merger to 1999 Bob Young was Red Hat's CEO. After leaving Red Hat he started Lulu, a self-publishing web-site that claims to be the world's fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books. He is Lulu's CEO.
Young also co-founded Linux Journal in 1994, and in 2003, he purchased the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, a Canadian Football League franchise.
In 2006 Young established the Lulu Blooker Prize, a book prize for books that began as blogs. He launched the prize partly as a means of promoting Lulu.
Young is strong believer in user-generated content and open source software. In a 2008 interview he described the way that online social media has empowered consumers:
Today the internet connects every single one of your customers, not just to you but to each other. So you produce a lemon of a car and you won’t know where to hide because your customers are going to tell each other about it and then the rest of the world about it. So it is actually a fundamentally healthy thing from a consumer point of view...
Conversely if you do have a better product suddenly you have these businesses that grow like top seed. If you come up with an innovation that serves, that resonates with customers, the internet will allow that innovation to spread dramatically faster than any other technology has enabled a new innovation to be adopted in the history of mankind.[2]
Family
Joyce Young, Bob Young's aunt, purchased stock in Red Hat Inc. shortly after its founding. When Red Hat's stock rose significantly after its initial public offering in 1999, they sold enough stock to recoup their initial investment, and retained some stocks. By January 2000, the remaining stock was valued in the millions. In June 2000, she donated $40 million to the Hamilton Community Foundation to be used largely in improvement of Hamilton-area health facilities, an act that represented one of the single largest charitable donations in Canadian history. The couple also made significant donations to the Royal Military College of Canada.
References
- ^ "Biography: Bob Young". http://www.feduja.org/evites/2006_Tech_BobYoung/young.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-21.
- ^ “Expert Business Advice: Bob Young on why the people are more powerful than ever” (video) Retrieved 2009-10-06
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