Jim Whitehurst
CEO, Red Hat
Taking an open source company past three billion in revenue
Rating
83Impact score
Domains
LinuxOpen source businessEnterprise
Scouting report
Came from Delta Air Lines to run Red Hat in 2008 and grew it from about $500 million to over $3 billion in annual revenue, the first open source company at that scale, before selling to IBM for $34 billion in 2019. He wrote The Open Organization, and backed the OpenShift bet on Kubernetes early.
Curator’s note
The proof that the open source business model scales past the true believers.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Jim Whitehurst by Red Hat, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.
Sources
- 01Jim Whitehurst en.wikipedia.org
- 02IBM acquisition of Red Hat en.wikipedia.org