Dale Dougherty


Dale Dougherty is the founder and CEO of Maker Media Inc. in San Francisco. Maker Media produces Make: magazine, which launched in 2005, and the Maker Faire, which was held first in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006. There were 151 Maker Faires held around the world in 2015. Dougherty was born in 1955 in Los Angeles and grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. He was a cofounder of O’Reilly Media, where he was the first editor of their computing trade books, and developed GNN, the first commercial website, in 1993. He coined “Web 2.0” in 2003. Make started at O’Reilly Media and spun out as its own company in January 2013. In 2011 Dougherty was honored at the White House as a Champion of Change through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business. He lives in Sebastopol, California, with his wife, Nancy.