TECH CIRCUS: Young's tech circus event in Raleigh's Dorton Arena will have 5 rings -- Extreme Computing, Fun & Games, Gear & Gadgets, Expansive Education, and Artis-Teka. In each ring will be a different display or activity and throughout the Cricus showgrounds, there will be other techno events and places to network with other technophiles. For more info, go to www.lulu.com or www.techcircus.com. The first show will be held September 27-29th at the Raleigh Fairgrounds Complex. |
Monday, June 28th, 2002 2:15PM BREAKING NEWS |
Red Hat founder Bob Young talks about: --Lulu.com, his new company --The possibility of taking the company public --Why he isn't at Red Hat anymore --And why he is a "competitor" to Matt Szulik in a general sense He also gives details on his upcoming "technology circus" and why he hopes to do for technology what BassMasters has done for fishing. The Triangle TechJournal: June 28th, 2002 www.triangletechjournal.com STAFF REPORTS CARY -- At the monthly dinner meeting of the Indus Entrepreneurs Carolinas chapter, we caught up with the well-known founder of Red Hat, Bob Young. In this Question and Answer interview, we chat with Young about his new firm, Lulu.com, and that company's future. We also talked with him about Red Hat as he joked about why Red Hat doesn't need "flaky entrepreneurs" like himself at the company anymore. And wrapping up, Young tells why making your customers successful is more important than making money as well as his philosophy that drives the new projects at Lulu. QUESTION: Tell us about Lulu.com and where you're going with it. BOB YOUNG: Well the most exciting thing about Lulu -- in the short run that we're doing today-- is the Lulu Technology Circus. Many people have heard about an organization called BASSMasters, which believe it or not runs a professional bass fishing competition derby. There are actually people who make their living fishing now from bass. But bass fishermen -- while they're wildly enthusiastic -- are classically hobbyists. There are about only 12 people who are on the professional bass fishing tour. The vast majority -- and there are some 600,000 members of BASSMasters -- are simply recreational bass fisherman and want to share their hobby with other people. What the technology circus is targeting is all of the technology users who are not only enthusiastic hobbyists, but this is also what they do for a living. And we're like, if there is a Bassmasters for bass fishermen-- and they [the attendees] don't earn any money off of that, it's a pure hobby -- then how much bigger can an organization be and how much more important is it to build an organization for the technology capable user to get more out of the technology he is using? So that's really where we started. QUESTION: Talk about the concept behind the "Lulu Technology Circus." BOB YOUNG: Most of the technology trade shows you ever go to, are all about the exhibitors. And the attendees are treated as cattle -- you're lucky if you get a free t-shirt. If we did an event that ignored the exhibitors -- yeah, they're welcome to come and we'll certainly love to have them -- but if the event is targeted primarily at the needs of the attendees, how much more fun can we do? So then we got to talking and thought 'What technologies [should be at the circus]?' Should it be robotics? Should it be the next open source programming? Should it be ham radio? Should it be wireless networking? Should it be video? And the answer was, it has to be all of the them. Because the really interesting thing is that the open source Linux programmers, they know open source Linux. They don't need to go to a trade show for it. The ham radio guys know ham radio. Where the interesting piece comes in -- and we're referring to a circus, because of the multiple rings, [whether] you have a nine ring circus or a five ring circus -- it's gonna be the rings. It's going to be the intersection between those rings that will make this actually worthwhile -- it won't be the free t-shirt. It will be the open source programming guy learning something about ham radio. It's gonna be the ham radio guy learning something about robotics. It's gonna be the robotics guys learning something about video. It's gonna be the video guys learning something about open source programming. QUESTION: Tell us some details about what will be at the "Circus." BOB YOUNG: Our first one September 27th at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds. We've taken over the Graham Building and the Dorton Arena. The Graham Building is 16,000 square feet of space, a lot more space than we need, but it's going to enable us to do fun things like robotics competitions or demonstrations. [We'll have] big swap meets, you can bring all of your old beaten-up gear and trade it to other people who have beaten-up gear. And you can hang out at certain "birds-of-a-feather" sections at what we call Village Greens and just meet other people who have similar interests to yours in whatever your interest in technology is. This thing's going to be fun -- it stems a little bit out of the old Linux expos that Red Hat used to put on here in the Triangle. Red Hat dropped the expo because Red Hat had more important things to do and IDG put on the big Linux expos out in California and took some of the enthusiasm away from ours. Sort of building on that, the Triangle really is a technology-concentrated economy. The vast majority of the economy down here is really in technology, so it seems a logical place to launch a first version of the Lulu technology circus. ...One of the areas that we're convinced the trade show industry has not done a good job with is the Linux trade shows. I don't think IDG and their LinuxWorld expos did a particularly good job. All of these expos are suffering a declining attendance because people are not finding anything novel or really useful out of those shows. So that's where we're going with the tech circus at the end of September here in Raleigh. QUESTION: Tell us about the other components of Lulu. BOB YOUNG: The whole concept to Lulu, sort of stepping back a little bit, is that we're looking at the concept that open-source is still in its early stages. It's spawned some great companies -- Red Hat obviously, but [also] IBM is doing a huge business in the open source space. And yet, I'm convinced the open source revolution is where the PC revolution was in about 1984. In other words, the PC had been invented as a HeathKit machine in '75, by '84 it was a big industry but with names like Obsbourne, VisiCalc, and Wordstar. People like Compaq and Dell hadn't even been founded by the start of '84, so I'm convinced that's where we are [today with open source.] The Linux kernel was launched in '91 and last year, it had its 10th birthday. Another 10 years from now, we're going to be spawning some Dells and Compaqs out of this revolution. Really, what we're trying to do with Lulu is see if we can't find customer needs, market opportunities. Things that the users of these technologies need us to do for them that other people are not doing for them or not doing well. QUESTION: What is the publishing side of Lulu? What will you do with the "Lulu Press" component? BOB YOUNG: Lulu press, interestingly enough, is addressing a similar but not directly related phenomenon in the intellectual property space that open source and Red Hat is solving in the software intellecutal property space. As you get more and more consolidation of copyrights...our legislators in their infinite wisdom have expanded copyright from where it was in the 60's at about 20 years. Now, if you're an individual, it's your lifetime plus 70 years. If you're a corporation, it's 95 years. Effectively, for technology users, that makes copyright permanent. And this was done without any real amount of public debate. We can solve this problem by marching on Washington and having rallies. Or, and this is one of Lulu's goals, we can help try and solve the problems, the inefficiencies that are created by over-regulating...by too much intellectual property legislation. We think we can solve it in the marketplace, or at least we think we can have fun trying to solve it in the marketplace. And one of the ways we want to do that is though Lulu Press. Lulu Press is not a publisher -- we will partner with all the publishers whether it's an individual person who wants to publish his own magazine whether it's a small publisher who has a series of specialty books that they want to get into their market or whether it's conceivably large publishers. We will in effect enable the publisher to talk directly to the consumer of his product. That's what Lulu Press is trying to do. In sum, Lulu Press is a classic Dot Com and we figure that Dot Coms are sufficiently out of favor today with the tech-stock knock down and all the rest, that being a good contrarian, now is the time to invest in the Dot Com business. QUESTION: Are you having more fun now than you did at Red Hat? BOB YOUNG: Am I having more fun? The answer is "no." I used to answer journalists questions in the early days of Red Hat when we were really struggling. VC's wouldn't return my phone calls, much less have any interest in what we were was doing. And everybody else in the industry I spoke to thought I was nuts, sort of running a company where we give away the technology we're building for free in order to get other people to contribute technology to the technology we're building. It was just a model so foreign to how the software industry works. Journalists used to keep saying "Why are you doing this?' and I used to answer "Because it should be illegal having this much fun in business." It was fun because our customers were so wildly enthusiastic about what we were doing. We were a Linux company and we were absolutely committed to open-sourcing every line of code we wrote. In other words, we were so focused on being part of that community of programmers. Because we recognized [that] it didn't matter how much brilliant code we wrote, more than 90% of the code that went into our product was contributed to us by other teams. Whether these were teams at GE or teams at NASA or just volunteer teams on the Internet, it didn't matter. So we had to be a part of that team and so we were just having fun doing it. So, am I having more fun? No, it's not possible to have more fun than I had at Red Hat. Am I having more fun at Lulu than I would be having today at Red Hat? The answer is obviously, yes. Simply because Red Hat is 600 people on 5 continents -- a highly disclipined, very, very effective corporation. But I've never even worked at a company with 600 people, much less managed one. No, that's not the right environment [for me], that's not what I do well. And Red Hat has the message -- Matt Szulik and Kevin Thompson and the team over at Red Hat, they understand the vision perfectly. I sit in on board meetings and they sound like Eric Raymond or Richard Stallman in the sense that they understand the value that they're delivering to their customers so clearly, so these guys are actually beyond where I tried to lead them to. And they are brilliant business people -- they deliver quarterly results. They're...on schedule as expected and that's because they run a highly focused, highly disciplined organization. And I'm this flaky entrepreneur. As I put it, someone who is an entrepreneur because no one would employ me. And Red Hat is smart enough not to employ idiots like Bob Young. So working at Red Hat is not a good fit. I'm a huge Red Hat shareholder, so I don't want flaky guys like Bob Young messing up my shares in this corporation that Matt Szulik and his team are assembling. So in that sense, am I having more fun at Lulu? The answer is yes. Because it gets me back into the fray, of trying to figure out the heavy lifting...the creative process of saying "Okay, here's the problem in the marketplace and how do we build a business model that allows us to solve that problem for our customers?" QUESTION: What are your long-term goals with Lulu? BOB YOUNG: Well, like anything else, the goal is to serve your customers. If we're successful -- that's a huge if -- we will build a loyal following and a bunch of happy customers. We'll build a bunch of revenues, profits. If we build a lot of revenue and a lot of profits, who knows, we may take it public when the public markets recover enough to be willing to consider flaky technology companies like ours. But our goal is not to make a lot of money, our goal is not to worry about what the score is. Our goal is to serve our customers. To come up with a solution to a problem that the customers we are targeting have. If we can do that, they'll be wildly enthusiastic. If they're wildly enthusiastic, we'll have the opportunity to make lots of money. But it's not about making money, it's about serving customers. Our goal is to be really successful in front of our customers. If we are, everything else will look after itself. Do I want to create a bigger success than Red Hat? Well, absolutely. And Matthew [Szulik] may be a really close friend of mine, but he's by definition a competitor. Not that I'm planning on competiting directly with him. But he's a competitor in the sense that, I don't know, he's really good at what he does and I like being good at what I do. So that's the fun bit of being in business is that opportunity to test yourself against the smartest people you can find. The goal of testing yourself is making your customers more successful than their customers. If you can do that, you have a lot of fun doing it and you achieve great things. TTJ |
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Monday, June 28th, 2002 2:15PM BREAKING NEWS |
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INTERVIEW: Bob Young and His New Technology Circus |
RING LEADER: Bob Young hopes to do for technology what BassMasters has done for fishing. |
TECH CIRCUS: Young's tech circus event in Raleigh's Dorton Arena will have 5 rings -- Extreme Computing, Fun & Games, Gear & Gadgets, Expansive Education, and Artis-Teka. In each ring will be a different display or activity and throughout the Cricus showgrounds, there will be other techno events and places to network with other technophiles. For more info, go to www.lulu.com or www.techcircus.com. The first show will be held September 27-29th at the Raleigh Fairgrounds Complex. |
