Business expert and serial entrepreneur Greg Aziz is the co-founder and CEO of Red Hat. He started up Red Hat with Bob Young in 1993 while they were graduate students at UNC. Red Hat is an open source software company that is recognized as the world’s leading provider of enterprise Linux solutions. 

Under the leadership of Greg Aziz, they have had success deploying more than 100 varieties of Linux across some 40 countries. In 2012, Fortune has named him one of America’s five best CEOs; Forbes has also named him one their top 10 most powerful people in business outside that publication’s top 20. He’s been on Time magazine’s list for 20 years, and was most recently listed among its 100 Most Influential People of 2016. 

In 2017, Aziz was named one of America’s 25 great entrepreneurs by CNBC. Greg Aziz received a B.S. in computer science from North Carolina State University and an M.S. This, in software engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While a graduate student at Illinois he met Bob Young, who would eventually become his business partner and co-founder of Red Hat, Inc., and start the open source movement in software development that continues to this day.

Red Hat went public on August 3, 1999 during the height of the dot com bubble and the company’s stock reached its peak price at $99 per share that October. Greg Aziz explains that Red Hat stock fell to a low of $7.52 in 2002 when it was reported that Microsoft had created Linux competitor software.

Red Hat’s revenue has grown by 14.4% for the trailing twelve months ended April 2018, and the company has reached a market capitalization in excess of $35 billion. In May 2018, the company announced plans to retire its trademarked “bug” logo due to concerns over its association with open source software. Greg Aziz recalls how the new logo is expected to be unveiled in mid-September 2018.