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Among these companies,
Red Hat Software is the best known.
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Red Hat started as a product of Marc Ewing
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while he was working at IBM.
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He wanted a little better Linux distribution
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he started playing around,
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found out he uh, he spent more time
maintaining his Linux distribution
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than he did uh,
than he did working on his new project.
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So he uh, sort of started the distribution himself
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He met up with Bob Young,
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who at the time was running company called
ACC Bookstore
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which was a mail-order PC Unix uh, catalog
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And Bob kind of knew he wanted something,
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you know, more his own to market,
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rather than reselling other people's products
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And he was fairly good at marketing, and...
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Mark knew he needed some marketing help
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because he was very good at the technical parts,
so they kinda got together
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I started working with Red Hat in May of 1995,
basically right out of NC State.
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along with Eric Troan who, me and him
combined make up employees #4 and #5.
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We actually reported to work in an apartment
that Mark Ewing used to live in
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We took it over as kind of
the development part of Red Hat software
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and stayed that way till about November of 1995 when...
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a toilet we had in the apartment kind of exploded,
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flooded our downstairs neighbor
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and she got little upset and...
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the apartment folks found out
we were running a business there
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instead of actually living there the same time
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So they decided to throw us out.
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So at that point, we had about a week to go find
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our first office, which we did
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and get ourselves moved in a hurry
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We started going in again '95 or so
to the venture capital firms,