Tim O'Reilly in Inc. Magazine

Inc. Magazine's profile of Tim O'Reilly does a great job of capturing what a really interesting, principled, and smart guy Tim is:

And yet amid all this healthy living, O'Reilly Media has had the kind of impact normally associated with much larger enterprises — and greater than that of even the most successful hedge fund manager. O'Reilly's work has inspired an entire generation of entrepreneurs — and his blog posts and essays can push big companies to drastically change course. "Tim really can make a whole industry happen," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who credits O'Reilly with helping to popularize the Web and says he expects O'Reilly to pull off the same trick with Gov 2.0. Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter, the hot start-up of the moment, says he owes much of his success to O'Reilly's work. "There's a quick-money unoriginality that is often pervasive in Silicon Valley," Williams says. "Tim has the ability to push people like myself to think bigger and more creatively."

Tech entrepreneurs who have yet to make it big generally regard O'Reilly with something approaching reverence. Darrius Thompson, the founder of OpenCandy, a software company in which O'Reilly has invested, vividly remembers his first meeting with Silicon Valley's unofficial prophet. He was waiting in a conference room in Sebastopol for a meeting with O'Reilly, and he found himself gazing out the window at the apple trees. As if out of nowhere, he saw a middle-aged man with a white beard, who seemed to be floating toward him.

Thompson was hit with a wave of the giggles as he realized that the floating figure was O'Reilly, walking down from a crest beyond the trees. O'Reilly made his way toward the building and disappeared from Thompson's field of vision for a few moments before entering the conference room and proclaiming, "I have no idea why I'm meeting with you, but I feel like I just have to." Thompson, who had always imagined O'Reilly as a sort of mystic, was positively giddy. "Whenever people ask, I always describe him as the Oracle in the Matrix movies," he says. The Oracle is a humble but wise old lady who bakes cookies and has a mysterious ability to predict the future. "That's Tim," Thompson says.

The Oracle of Silicon Valley

(via Kottke)