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CEO, Lulu, Inc.
Bob Young is founder and CEO of Lulu.com, an online marketplace for digital content and the world's fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books. Lulu.com is a web site that allows authors, educators, artists, musicians, businesses and others publish their own books, images, multimedia and music and sell them to the world; all without surrendering either ownership or control.
Lulu is the latest innovative business started by Young, hitherto best-known as a visionary entrepreneur and co-founder of Red Hat, the open source software company that he helped turn into a household name and chief rival to Microsoft and Sun. His success at Red Hat won him many accolades, including the nomination as one of Business Week Magazine's "Top Entrepreneurs" in 1999 and the reputation in some circles as 'the antidote to Bill Gates'.
Young believes that Lulu, with a little help from the Internet and the latest print-on-demand technology, is revolutionizing the publishing industry in the same way that Red Hat and open source revolutionized the software industry; and is doing so by the same process of putting the consumer in control.
Bob graduated from the University of Toronto in 1976 prior to beginning his career in the computer finance arena.
Before founding Red Hat in 1993, Bob spent 20 years at the helm of two computer-leasing companies he founded. That experience as a high tech entrepreneur combined with his innate marketing savvy to give rise to Red Hat's success. His book, Under the Radar, chronicles how Red Hat's open source strategy successfully won wide industry acceptance in a market previously dominated by proprietary binary-only systems.
In 1999 Bob founded The Center for the Public Domain, a non-profit foundation that supports the growth of a healthy and robust public domain of knowledge and the arts.
In March 2002, Bob Young launched Lulu Enterprises, an online marketplace for digital content.
Lulu's name comes from the concept of a "lulu," which is an old-fashioned term for a remarkable person, object or idea.
Lulu is driven by Young's strong commitment to information access as a foundation for knowledge advancement, whether in education, computer code, or other realms.
Bob calls himself a capitalist but he might also be called a 'Luluist', if not a 'Lululutionary'. He is, at least, the inventor of 'Luluism', the new political philosophy, which may be the most exciting new political idea to emerge since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Internet.
Luluism goes beyond either communism and capitalism and squares the circle between them. Like communism - at least in theory - Luluism allows the workers (in this case, writers, photographers, musicians and other 'creators') to own the means of production (the rights to their own books, photographs, music, etc), instead of having to sign them away to big media companies. But like the purest form of capitalism, it then lets the free-market decide and rule. Bob says: 'Viva La Lulu-lucion!
Bob is also the owner of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, a team in the Canadian Football League. Finally, he may also be the world's leading authority on electric golf-carts on which he is now writing the definitive reference book - soon to be published with the aid of Lulu.com.
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