High Five: Meet Bob Young, CEO Of LuluHigh Five: Meet Bob Young, CEO Of Lulu

Photograph by Milton Morris

1

FUTURE POWERHOUSE
Red Hat began when Marc Ewing, the originator of Red Hat Linux, merged his company with Young's ACC Corp., a Linux and Unix catalog business in New York, in 1995. "Marc did the engineering. I did sales and operations. We moved ACC down to the hills of North Carolina."

2

SOMETHING DIFFERENT
"Lulu is very different from Red Hat. Lulu is trying to create a marketplace for authors, musicians, filmmakers. On Lulu, it doesn't cost anything to publish your book. We're trying to do for content what eBay has done for things."

3

SPARKING MARKETS
"We did $13 million in 2006. We project north of $30 million in 2007. Richard Brown sells a thousand copies a year of Richard Brown's Replica Watch Report, at $39.96. It costs $15 to print and he keeps 80% of the royalties. No publisher would go anywhere near it."

4

HOORAY FOR OPEN SOURCE
Lulu depends heavily on open source software, Young says. "We use Red Hat Linux, PostgreSQL, Apache. Eighty to 90% of our software infrastructure is open source. If we had had to buy all the elements, we wouldn't have been able to afford the engineering to build our applications."

5

ALWAYS A CONTRARIAN
"Our business model is the opposite of a publishing house. A major publisher would like 10 authors selling millions of books; we'd like a million authors selling 10 books each. We have a bad poetry market all over Lulu," he says with tongue in cheek. "Our authors are not trying to publish with Random House."