Tim O'Reilly is Silicon Valley's leading intellectual and the founder of O'Reilly Media, a steadily growing $100 million company. His life is a vivid demonstration that interesting things can happen when you are working for more than money.
"Can I jump in here?"
Tim O'Reilly tentatively lifts a finger and then lurches toward a microphone, brushing past a line of besuited men and women that includes Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco; Vivek Kundra, the White House chief information officer; and half a dozen bored television and radio reporters.
We are in a government building near San Francisco City Hall, and the mayor is plodding through a press conference related to government transparency and technology. Unfortunately, no one -- not even Newsom himself -- seems to know exactly what the announcement is about. There is talk of "apps" and "partnering" and the opportunity to "use information and download that information and mash that information up" -- a small fragment from a long, incomprehensible sentence. In case anyone is confused about the mayor's confusion, he concludes this 10-minute ramble with a grin and says, "I hope you'll get your sound bites from someone else."
Cue Tim O'Reilly, a prolific entrepreneur and a master of turning the most prosaic technology matter into poetry. O'Reilly distinguishes himself in this group by being the only person really capable of explaining why we are gathered here and also as the only person not dressed for the occasion. Gray hair wildly frizzed, he wears an old thermal under a cotton blazer and a pair of wrinkled gray trousers, looking the part of an eccentric professor rather than the CEO of a $100 million company.
In a way, he is both -- at once Silicon Valley's leading intellectual and the founder of a growing and profitable publishing company, O'Reilly Media. The 32-year-old business has weathered four recessions and the decline of the printed book and now employs about 250 people. In addition to publishing some best-selling computer books -- the Missing Manual series is a 117-volume collection on a variety of topics, including how to manage your money and how to use Windows 7 -- O'Reilly Media organizes more than a dozen large conferences and has a dizzying array of other businesses. These include an online education division, a service for reading books online, a popular magazine called Make, and a venture capital firm that invested in Blogger, the most popular blog platform in the world.
But more than any of this, O'Reilly is worth listening to because he has been on top of nearly every important technology development of the past three decades. His company got into the e-book business more than 20 years before the release of the Kindle; it created the first commercial website; and it was making money off the open-source software movement when software patents were still the rage. In short, he is the guy who will tell you what smart people will be talking about five years from now -- the guy who predicts the future.
Today, the future is something O'Reilly is calling Gov 2.0. The city of San Francisco, at O'Reilly's urging, has begun allowing outside companies to tap into its data and create small software applications, or apps, for mobile phones. So far, these apps are modest in ambition -- there is an app, for instance, that will tell you the relative crime rates for wherever you happen to be in the city and another that will tell you the names of the trees on the block -- but O'Reilly thinks they are the beginning of something big. "We've come to think about government as a kind of vending machine -- we put in our taxes and we get out services," he begins, drawing on an analogy he had recently come across in a book called The Next Government of the United States. "And if we don't get the services we want, we shake the vending machine. We get to protest. We write our congressmen. We have a tea party.…But there are better things we can build than vending machines."
Like shiny gadgets. O'Reilly extracts an Apple iPhone from the front pocket of his blazer and holds it up for the cameras. He glances at the phone and smiles, as if surprised by some new discovery. "Apple…built this platform," he says. A platform, he notes, that has attracted some 150,000 apps, almost none of which were created by the computer company itself. He suggests that governments can do likewise, harnessing the entrepreneurial energies of a hundred thousand kids. And he has been trying to convince lawmakers, government contractors, and anybody else who will listen that Gov 2.0 isn't just the future of technology; it is also the future of democracy.
"It's hard to make something as large as a government change," he says. "It's a little bit like building the transcontinental railroad."
What drives entrepreneurs to achieve great things? In a recent article in The New Yorker, the best-selling author and trend spotter Malcolm Gladwell proposes an answer: money.
Gladwell argues that great entrepreneurs are fundamentally "predators" who "seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting." As his prime example, Gladwell chooses John Paulson, a hedge fund manager who made $15 billion in 2007 by shorting the residential real estate market. It's a curious argument -- unlike most entrepreneurs, Paulson made his money from the destruction of value rather than its creation. And yet, in Paulson, Gladwell sees an archetype for the successful entrepreneur. "In the predator model, the entrepreneur's advantage is analytical," he writes. Great entrepreneurs are not visionaries or risk takers -- they just have better economic modeling skills than the rest of us. This may help explain the success of some entrepreneurs, but for most people who build actual companies, it just doesn't wash. The vast majority of businesses are created not to produce as much wealth as possible but rather to give their founders a pleasant life and a sense of personal satisfaction. Yes, most entrepreneurs want to make money, but they are perfectly happy without making billions of dollars a year. They are not predators; they are farmers.
Perhaps because there is small glory in being a farmer, successful entrepreneurs rarely describe themselves this way. Read most corporate histories and you are left with a sense of the founder as master of the universe, not a mere lifestyle entrepreneur. That term, which often carries undertones of laziness, usually describes the sort of person who runs a bar, a sailing school, or a travel company. Lifestyle entrepreneurs, we assume, are of a different species from the ambitious sort Gladwell has in mind. But that is not true, either, and Tim O'Reilly is proof.
