12 ms·

Before sale to IBM for billions, Red Hat started in cofounder's closet

121 points by goldminer88 8y ago

happy-go-lucky 8y ago
> "The $34 billion success has nothing to do with me. I will take some credit for spotting the initial opportunity. The actual execution of that opportunity, the credit goes to much smarter guys than me." I respect Young for such an honest attribution.
- todipa 8y ago
  "Young now calls his wife "probably the single-most important contributor" to the initial success of Red Hat. "Without my wife Nancy's sterling credit rating, I wouldn't been able to raise the money that got us to profitability," he says." I can relate to this.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- josephmx 8y ago
  He did leave the company 13 years ago as far as I can tell
  - pfranz 8y ago
    That might be, but by the late 90s my first few stabs at Linux were using Red Hat because it was far enough along that books were published and available at my local book store (I did also try Yellow Dog, a Red Hat variant, when repurposing an old PowerPC). By the early 2000s I saw box sets in Best Buy. In my industry, most of the large companies moved from IRIX to Red Hat and have been using them since. Most of the others moved to a different free distro, then to CentOS.
    - josephmx 8y ago
      Sure, and it seems like he's happy to take credit for that era, but most of Red Hats value came from the time after Young left, and I don't really think it's modesty for him to not take credit for that
- makotech222 8y ago
  "Luckily though, since i'm the owner, I have all the stock and i get all 34 billion. Mmm capitalism. Note: I don't know the situation regarding stock at Red Hat, but this is in general what happens.
- clairity 8y ago
  totally appreciate his humility but also think he can take a little more credit. i'd (briefly) considered creating a commercial linux company way back when, but didn't have the wherewithal or gumption to do so. a key ingredient is being able to get started, attract and accept help, and then have enough sense to give others room to work.
newaccoutnas 8y ago
non-AMP version https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/before-sale-to-ibm-for-billions-red-hat-started-in-cofounders-closet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/before-sale-to-ibm-for-billi...
partycoder 8y ago
> While at CMU, Marc Ewing was known to wear a red hat as he walked between classes. Because of his computer expertise, people would ask for help from the "man in the red hat". Ewing and co-founder Bob Young named their initial software after the hat, and the name Red Hat stuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Ewing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Ewing
- zekrioca 8y ago
  Still.. No one talks about him any longer, and the Wikipedia article is so short that we cannot know what else he did after leaving Red Hat..
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Apparently he left the tech industry, co-founded the Alpinist[1] (he has sold it since), and started pursuing sailing on a competitive level. He has also a sparse Github profile: https://github.com/marcewing https://github.com/marcewing [1] http://www.alpinist.com/p/magazine/AboutUs http://www.alpinist.com/p/magazine/AboutUs
    - cgh 8y ago
      What the...? I had no idea about this. I am a subscriber to Alpinist. In fact, I renewed my subscription not too long ago via one of my laptops, which is running Fedora. Thanks for a couple of great things, Marc.
    - eigenvector 8y ago
      As a Red Hat user and Alpinist reader, thanks for sharing this. I never knew the connection.
throw7 8y ago
props. humble guy. credit to the rpm guys... binary builds from clean untouched tar files sealed the deal for me back then. i still miss the box sets.
dmschulman 8y ago
Red Hat was initially financed by opening 8 different credit cards and accruing $50,000 in credit cart debt before they began bring profitable. I never knew this before but really drives home how hard/risky it was to bootstrap your own business back then.
- lowercased 8y ago
  why the "back then" modifier? it's still hard/risky now.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    1993-1994 was before the first flush of "dotcom 1.0" era VC money, which showed up in the 1996-2000 era before the big crash.
    - lowercased 8y ago
      Existence of VC money is irrelevant to 'bootstrapping'. Taking VC money is sort of the opposite of bootstrapping.
      - walrus01 8y ago
        Existence of easy seed and pre-series-A funding nowadays means people don't even try to bootstrap with 50k in personal 20% APR debt. Similarly in 1998, 1999, a lot of wild dreamers with harebrained ideas got VC money pretty easily after a few PowerPoints and some bullshitting.
        tibbon 8y ago
        Google also used a bunch of credit cards initially from what I understand. I'd rather have 20% APR, than give away 20% equity. Why? Because when the debt is paid to the credit card company they go away. The VCs will always want more and more, pushing your company faster than it should go.
robotsquidward 8y ago
That's it, I'm moving my startup under my stairs.
- vidanay 8y ago
  Yer a wizard Harry!
gorkish 8y ago
I have a fond memory of the original redhat distros involving a closet. Sometime in the mid 90's, I was installing RedHat on an old (even for the time) 486/33 server that we had managed to acquire with the understanding that it be relocated the next day to a closet in another building across campus. Since the machine was actually on a desk, we thought we should do the install before having to move it to a cramped space. The installation ended up taking like 18 hours on that box, and it came time to move before it was finished. So we unplugged the UPS and had a bunch of people walk the thing across campus along with its tiny monochrome monitor still showing the RedHat installer filling up progress bars over and over. It prompted a lot of questions and strange looks. We were worried that the batteries were going to give out, but we made it. The machine carried on dutifully for many years longer than it should have. The Redhat distro along with rpm really made Linux a workable and supportable platform, and they deserve a lot of credit for their efforts.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Its actually APT (apt-get) which made Linux a workable platform because before that we had to manually hunt for package updates (such as RPMs). That was horrific. It is the sole reason I ever went to try (and switch to) Debian, coming from RPM-based distributions.
  - InclinedPlane 8y ago
    Yup. I've been using linux/unix since before package managers were common and debian was like a breath of fresh air. Even with RPMs it was generally always just easier to build stuff from source than to deal with RedHat's funky package system. And APT? APT was easy mode, it worked like magic. If you needed something you just installed it and the OS picked up the latest package and all the dependencies and installed all of it for you. It seems trivial today but back when always connected broadband internet was not the norm it was transformative. It took years and years for RedHat to catch up. I still have a sore spot about RedHat because of those earlier experiences. Things are so much easier now in so many ways. For one it's a lot less common to have a computer that can't access the internet because it doesn't have the right drivers already. For another it's a lot less common to only have one computer (including smartphones) and thus only one way to download stuff. Computers are also way faster so doing anything that requires installing or compiling stuff isn't as big of a time sink.
delinquentme 8y ago
Didn't someone in SV say "Software is eating the world"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_mergers_and_acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical... I suppose 34B is a good run. I mean its not $110B, but its not Biotech so.
jayliew 8y ago
- The lower-level the category the more customers want support on it. - The more you can commoditize the layers below you, the more the market likes it. Red Hat does this for servers. - The lower-level the category the more the market actually “wants” it standardized in order to minimize entropy. This is why low-level infrastructure categories become natural monopolies or oligopolies. source: https://kellblog.com/2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in-open-source-thoughts-on-the-hortonworks-s-1/ https://kellblog.com/2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in...
teddyh 8y ago
The article portrays this as a success story, but was making “billions” the point or goal of Red Hat? If it wasn’t, then they have now failed. Because that’s all you get when you “exit” like this – you get money.

121 points by goldminer88 8y ago

> "The $34 billion success has nothing to do with me. I will take some credit for spotting the initial opportunity. The actual execution of that opportunity, the credit goes to much smarter guys than me." I respect Young for such an honest attribution.

todipa 8y ago
"Young now calls his wife "probably the single-most important contributor" to the initial success of Red Hat. "Without my wife Nancy's sterling credit rating, I wouldn't been able to raise the money that got us to profitability," he says." I can relate to this.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
josephmx 8y ago
He did leave the company 13 years ago as far as I can tell
- pfranz 8y ago
  That might be, but by the late 90s my first few stabs at Linux were using Red Hat because it was far enough along that books were published and available at my local book store (I did also try Yellow Dog, a Red Hat variant, when repurposing an old PowerPC). By the early 2000s I saw box sets in Best Buy. In my industry, most of the large companies moved from IRIX to Red Hat and have been using them since. Most of the others moved to a different free distro, then to CentOS.
  - josephmx 8y ago
    Sure, and it seems like he's happy to take credit for that era, but most of Red Hats value came from the time after Young left, and I don't really think it's modesty for him to not take credit for that
makotech222 8y ago
"Luckily though, since i'm the owner, I have all the stock and i get all 34 billion. Mmm capitalism. Note: I don't know the situation regarding stock at Red Hat, but this is in general what happens.
clairity 8y ago
totally appreciate his humility but also think he can take a little more credit. i'd (briefly) considered creating a commercial linux company way back when, but didn't have the wherewithal or gumption to do so. a key ingredient is being able to get started, attract and accept help, and then have enough sense to give others room to work.

newaccoutnas 8y ago

non-AMP version https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/before-sale-to-ibm-for-billions-red-hat-started-in-cofounders-closet.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/before-sale-to-ibm-for-billi...

partycoder 8y ago

> While at CMU, Marc Ewing was known to wear a red hat as he walked between classes. Because of his computer expertise, people would ask for help from the "man in the red hat". Ewing and co-founder Bob Young named their initial software after the hat, and the name Red Hat stuck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Ewing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Ewing

zekrioca 8y ago
Still.. No one talks about him any longer, and the Wikipedia article is so short that we cannot know what else he did after leaving Red Hat..
- icebraining 8y ago
  Apparently he left the tech industry, co-founded the Alpinist[1] (he has sold it since), and started pursuing sailing on a competitive level. He has also a sparse Github profile: https://github.com/marcewing https://github.com/marcewing [1] http://www.alpinist.com/p/magazine/AboutUs http://www.alpinist.com/p/magazine/AboutUs
  - cgh 8y ago
    What the...? I had no idea about this. I am a subscriber to Alpinist. In fact, I renewed my subscription not too long ago via one of my laptops, which is running Fedora. Thanks for a couple of great things, Marc.
  - eigenvector 8y ago
    As a Red Hat user and Alpinist reader, thanks for sharing this. I never knew the connection.

throw7 8y ago

props. humble guy. credit to the rpm guys... binary builds from clean untouched tar files sealed the deal for me back then. i still miss the box sets.

dmschulman 8y ago

Red Hat was initially financed by opening 8 different credit cards and accruing $50,000 in credit cart debt before they began bring profitable. I never knew this before but really drives home how hard/risky it was to bootstrap your own business back then.

lowercased 8y ago
why the "back then" modifier? it's still hard/risky now.
- walrus01 8y ago
  1993-1994 was before the first flush of "dotcom 1.0" era VC money, which showed up in the 1996-2000 era before the big crash.
  - lowercased 8y ago
    Existence of VC money is irrelevant to 'bootstrapping'. Taking VC money is sort of the opposite of bootstrapping.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      Existence of easy seed and pre-series-A funding nowadays means people don't even try to bootstrap with 50k in personal 20% APR debt. Similarly in 1998, 1999, a lot of wild dreamers with harebrained ideas got VC money pretty easily after a few PowerPoints and some bullshitting.
      - tibbon 8y ago
        Google also used a bunch of credit cards initially from what I understand. I'd rather have 20% APR, than give away 20% equity. Why? Because when the debt is paid to the credit card company they go away. The VCs will always want more and more, pushing your company faster than it should go.

robotsquidward 8y ago

That's it, I'm moving my startup under my stairs.

vidanay 8y ago
Yer a wizard Harry!

gorkish 8y ago

I have a fond memory of the original redhat distros involving a closet. Sometime in the mid 90's, I was installing RedHat on an old (even for the time) 486/33 server that we had managed to acquire with the understanding that it be relocated the next day to a closet in another building across campus. Since the machine was actually on a desk, we thought we should do the install before having to move it to a cramped space. The installation ended up taking like 18 hours on that box, and it came time to move before it was finished. So we unplugged the UPS and had a bunch of people walk the thing across campus along with its tiny monochrome monitor still showing the RedHat installer filling up progress bars over and over. It prompted a lot of questions and strange looks. We were worried that the batteries were going to give out, but we made it. The machine carried on dutifully for many years longer than it should have. The Redhat distro along with rpm really made Linux a workable and supportable platform, and they deserve a lot of credit for their efforts.

Fnoord 8y ago
Its actually APT (apt-get) which made Linux a workable platform because before that we had to manually hunt for package updates (such as RPMs). That was horrific. It is the sole reason I ever went to try (and switch to) Debian, coming from RPM-based distributions.
- InclinedPlane 8y ago
  Yup. I've been using linux/unix since before package managers were common and debian was like a breath of fresh air. Even with RPMs it was generally always just easier to build stuff from source than to deal with RedHat's funky package system. And APT? APT was easy mode, it worked like magic. If you needed something you just installed it and the OS picked up the latest package and all the dependencies and installed all of it for you. It seems trivial today but back when always connected broadband internet was not the norm it was transformative. It took years and years for RedHat to catch up. I still have a sore spot about RedHat because of those earlier experiences. Things are so much easier now in so many ways. For one it's a lot less common to have a computer that can't access the internet because it doesn't have the right drivers already. For another it's a lot less common to only have one computer (including smartphones) and thus only one way to download stuff. Computers are also way faster so doing anything that requires installing or compiling stuff isn't as big of a time sink.

delinquentme 8y ago

Didn't someone in SV say "Software is eating the world"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_mergers_and_acquisitions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical... I suppose 34B is a good run. I mean its not $110B, but its not Biotech so.

jayliew 8y ago

- The lower-level the category the more customers want support on it. - The more you can commoditize the layers below you, the more the market likes it. Red Hat does this for servers. - The lower-level the category the more the market actually “wants” it standardized in order to minimize entropy. This is why low-level infrastructure categories become natural monopolies or oligopolies. source: https://kellblog.com/2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in-open-source-thoughts-on-the-hortonworks-s-1/ https://kellblog.com/2014/11/18/it-aint-easy-making-money-in...

teddyh 8y ago

The article portrays this as a success story, but was making “billions” the point or goal of Red Hat? If it wasn’t, then they have now failed. Because that’s all you get when you “exit” like this – you get money.