Bob Young - ringmaster extraordinaire

From evangelist to CEO and back to evangelist again...

He was the man most closely associated with Red Hat, a company that took the industry by storm in the late 1990s. But where is he now? Kate Hanaghan discovers it's hard to keep a good entrepreneur down... Question: What does a creative entrepreneur do when the company he's created blossoms and becomes a success? Answer: He starts another one. And so it goes. The life of an entrepreneur is often, by its very nature, serial. Bob Young is a typical example. He recently resigned as chairman of Linux distributor Red Hat having spent years building it from the ground up. But Young would argue his departure, and the subsequent infiltration of the suits, has not been to the detriment of what is probably the world's most successful open source company. From the moment he handed the reins to current chairman and CEO Matthew Szulik, Young demands have remained the same. "Management must be committed from a customer perspective and not necessarily an ideological one," he told silicon.com. The open source community is notoriously dedicated to its cause but Young had no qualms about leaving the company he had built. "It wasn't a wrench to leave and it's been a pleasure to watch it prosper," he said. In fact, his departure had been on the cards for some time. Young is not a man of management. He can do it - but only to a certain level. And anyway, he doesn't particularly like it. He is by no means a born leader of a global company with hundreds of employees. For instance, he says of Red Hat, when it reached the 600 employees milestone, "I'd never even worked for a company of that size, let alone managed one". Even before the company floated in 1999 Young was well aware of the problems his dislike of high-level management might spawn. He promptly started recruiting senior managers and in 1998 made Matthew Szulik CEO. So bearing in mind his aversion to management and his entrepreneurial tendencies it would only be a matter of time before he started on something else. Young's newly unveiled venture, Lulu, is his latest project and unlikely to be his last. The name bears no relationship to the namesake Scottish singer. Instead, it's a term from the 1920s meaning a remarkable person, object or idea. There are essentially two arms to Lulu: e-publishing and exhibiting. But Young has remained true to the philosophy that fuelled the growth of Red Hat. What drives him is his desire for access to information, whether it be code or education or anything else. His Lulu Press is an online publisher. Organisations, such as colleges, might want to publish a course guide, for instance, but allow student and lecturers to make changes to improve it and re-publish it. While the press release says it will "re-architect the way that universities, associations and corporations develop and distribute creative works", Young simply said: "We want to be the eBay of the e-publishing space." He's still a director at Red Hat and an open source evangelist. And, along with challenging the fundamentals of copyrighting, he's also turning his wrath on the menace that is trade shows. The other part of his Lulu venture wants to break with what he describes as a tradition of treating visitors like "cattle fodder". He said: "As an attendee you're left out of the equation. The most you get is a free T-shirt." And nowadays, you're not even assured of that. [See http://www.silicon.com/a52836 ] Rather than the emphasis being on the vendors, the manufacturers and the money makers, Young's Tech Circus - as he calls it - will be about the technology enthusiasts, hobbyists and IT professionals. It's about work time and play time with events about everything from super-computing to animation to wireless communications. One of the largest companies already to have signed up with the venture is Lego - building-block favourite of all fledging (object oriented?) programmers. With its computerised controller, Young argues the Danish company provides "the easiest way into robotics". The official literature says the circus meets the needs of the 'inner geek in all of us'. So far it's an event restricted to the US but there are plans to bring it to Europe at some stage. Young's a quirky guy. And yes, in his Red Hat days he regularly sported a red hat - and red socks. At Lulu.com, among the links to other sites are needlepoint.com and nhc.noaa.gov, the National Hurricane Center. But he's also a classic entrepreneur. And, as every entrepreneur knows, not every idea becomes a raging success. And while Lulu might mean remarkable, that certainly doesn't mean Young's project will be.