Location and Points of Control

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media. His original business plan was “interesting work for interesting people,” and that’s worked out pretty well. He publishes books, runs conferences, invests in early-stage startups, urges companies to create more value than they capture, and tries to change the world by spreading and amplifying the knowledge of innovators.

• Web site

A few people have asked me to post a little more information about myself. If you want to see my corporate bio, check out my LinkedIn profile. You can also check out my Flickr pictures (includes both business and personal pictures).

I grew up in California and Surrey, England. I started college at U.C. Berkeley, and transferred to Claremont McKenna, a tiny college located near Los Angeles, after my freshman year. I majored in economics. I went straight from college to law school at Stanford in 1992, and graduated in 1995.

I spent a few years as a corporate attorney at O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini, working exclusively with technology companies. My clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a bunch of startups, venture funds and investment banks.

The late nineties were heady days in Silicon Valley – at any given time I was working on a number of IPOs, venture financings, and merger transactions. I also co-authored a book on IPOs while I was working at Wilson Sonsini, which is still in print (on its second edition) by Bowne. I worked all the time.

I left law firm life to join a hot startup and run sales and business development. The startup, RealNames, filed to go public but didn’t make it out before the bubble burst. Eventually, RealNames liquidated after raising over $100 million in venture capital. I left that startup as it was going through the IPO process and co-founded a company called Achex. We raised nearly $20 million after the bubble burst and sold the company to First Data Corp about a year later for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.

I’ve worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including SnapNames and Verisign. In addition to TechCrunch, I am a founder of edgeio and a member of the edgeio board of directors.