Tim O'Reilly

Timothy O'Reilly (born 6 June 1954) is an Irish-American author and publisher, who is the founder of O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates). He popularised the terms open source and Web 2.0.

Born in County Cork, Ireland, Tim O'Reilly moved to San Francisco, California with his family when he was a baby. He has three brothers and three sisters. As a teenager, encouraged by his older brother Sean, O'Reilly became a follower of George Simon, a writer and adherent of the general semantics program. Through Simon, O'Reilly became acquainted with the work of Alfred Korzybski, which he has cited as a formative experience.

In 1973, O'Reilly enrolled at Harvard College to study classics and graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1975. During O'Reilly's first year at Harvard, George Simon died in an accident.

After graduating, O'Reilly completed an edition of Simon's Notebooks, 1965–1973. He also wrote a well-received book on the science fiction writer Frank Herbert and edited a collection of Herbert's essays and interviews. O'Reilly got started as a technical writer in 1977. He started publishing computer manuals in 1983, setting up his business in a converted barn in Newton, Massachusetts, where about a dozen employees worked in a single open room. In 1989, O'Reilly moved his company to Sebastopol, California, and published the Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog, which was a best-seller in 1992. O'Reilly's business, then known as O'Reilly & Associates, steadily grew through the 1990s, during which period it expanded from paper printed materials to web publishing. In 1993, the company's catalogue became an early web portal, the Global Network Navigator, which in 1995 was sold to America Online.

The company suffered in the dot-com crash of 2000. As book sales decreased, O'Reilly laid off about seventy people, approximately a quarter of staff, but thereafter rebuilt the company around ebook publishing and event production. In 2011, Tim O'Reilly gave control of O'Reilly Media to the company's CFO, Laura Baldwin, but kept his longtime title of CEO.

As a venture capitalist, O'Reilly has invested in companies such as Fastly, Blogger, Delicious, Foursquare, Bitly, and Chumby. O'Reilly serves on the board of directors of Safari Books Online, Maker Media, PeerJ, and the nonprofit organization Code for America. He was a board member of Macromedia until its 2005 merger with Adobe Systems, and of MySQL AB until its sale to Sun Microsystems. In February 2012, he joined the UC Berkeley School of Information Advisory Board.

In 2017, O'Reilly published the book WTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us about technology's potential to enhance the human experience.

In 1996, O'Reilly fought against a 10-Connection Limit on TCP/IP NT Workstations, writing a letter to the United States Department of Justice, Bill Gates, and CNN, concerned that the Internet was still in its infancy, and that limitations could cripple the technology before it ever had a chance to reach its full potential. In 2001, O'Reilly was involved in a dispute with Amazon.com, against Amazon's one-click patent and, specifically, Amazon's assertion of that patent against rival Barnes & Noble. The protest ended with O'Reilly and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos visiting Washington D.C. to lobby for patent reform.

After graduating from Harvard, O'Reilly married his first wife, Christina, with whom he moved to the Boston area. The couple raised two daughters, Arwen and Meara. Arwen is married to Saul Griffith.

On 11 April 2015 O'Reilly married Jennifer Pahlka, a former Deputy CTO of the US, and founder and former Executive Director of Code for America.