Mark Shuttleworth was the man who began with the idea of Ubuntu.
However the concept of Ubuntu is much older, the concept behind the
word is translated many ways but all boils down to being a good
neighbor and treating others well.
The technology is not entirely the creation of Mark
Shuttleworth, it is based on the work of thousands of others in the
free and open source movement many of whom contribute to the Debian
project which is the base of Ubuntu