“Knowing how to code is only one piece of the puzzle. Tim O’Reilly writes well — and he knows how to build up a team of capable writers and editors so that his business can scale. He did some technical writing on his own after college, and it didn’t take long for him to see the chance to build a business, instead of just paying the rent.

By: Kevin Shockey

Most important, O’Reilly has a deep understanding of how knowledge should disseminate in a society, and how best to make that happen. O’Reilly Media doesn’t just truck its books into bookstores and wait for customers; it develops a deep engagement with the engineering community through all sorts of low-cost, ingenious ways. Building a knowledge community is an art, and O’Reilly got the right training during his 1970s stint at Harvard. As he told a Harvard interviewer a while ago: “The classics are part of my mental tool set; the context I think with.”