The Council for Entrepreneurial Development’s new Hall of Fame is kicking off with a powerful lineup of honorees:

  • The father of venture capital in North Carolina
  • The co-founder of Quintiles
  • A longtime tech industry lawyer
  • The irrepressible co-founder of Red Hat.

They are, respectively:

  • Dennis Dougherty, Intersouth Partners
  • Dennis Gillings, former Quintiles chairman and CEO
  • Fred Hutchison of HutchLaw
  • Bob Young, now CEO of PrecisionHawk who helped launch Red Hat

The four will be inducted at a special event as part of the annual CED Founders Day on May 17.

A “small selection committee” selected by the CED made the choices.

The four are obviously deserving choices.

Dougherty is considered the patriarch of venture capital in the state, having established one of the oldest VC firms. He’s also long been a pillar around which North Carolina’s booming entrepreneurial sector has been built, providing not only hundreds of millions of dollars in funding but also mentorship and service to groups such as the CED.

Gillings co-founded Quintiles while a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, believing a life science business could be built around his expertise (statistics). Out of a trailer (the first home), Quintiles expanded into a global empire as a leader in the contract research industry.

Hutchison is one of the best known lawyers in the technology community, having help guide scores of startups through creation to commercial success to a host of successful exits. Like, Dougherty, Hutchison also has been long committed to public service across the tech sector. He was the founding president of the CED.

then there is Young, who invested in and then was asked to become CEO of PrecisionHawk, a rapidly growing drone technology firm in Raleigh. He also founded Lulu, a global self-publishing company based in Raleigh, and owns the Hamilton TigerCats of the Canadian Football League. However, he’s best known as the colorful co-founder of open source leader Red Hat.

In announcing the choices, CED’s Chief Executive Officer Joan Siefert Rose praised the four.

“We owe a debt of gratitude to the 2016 North Carolina Entrepreneur Hall of Fame class for their leadership, vision and commitment,” she said. “The selection committee adopted a guideline of ‘would the entrepreneurial community be dramatically different if this candidate had not founded a business here, made investments here, or provided services or support here?’ In looking at the contributions of each of our inductees the answer, unequivocally, is ‘yes.’”

The selection committee included eight people and considered more than 36 candidates. To be selected, candidates had to receive more than 80 percent of the votes.

The Founders Day program will take place at The Frontier in RTP starting at 5 p.m.

Profiles of the four winners are included in this related post.

Registration information:

http://bit.ly/CEDFounders