Gary Hoover
Business History Fellow
Gary Hoover is a business history fellow at the Archbridge Institute and lead author of the institute’s popular “American Originals” series. He is the rare combination of a business scholar and practitioner. He started his first company in Austin, Texas, over 30 years ago: BOOKSTOP, the first chain of giant book superstores, later purchased by industry leader Barnes & Noble. Before venturing out as an entrepreneur, he worked as a stock analyst on Wall Street and a retail executive at Fortune 500 Companies. His second startup evolved into Hoovers.com, the leading website for company information, now owned by Dun & Bradstreet.
He has a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago, where he studied under four Nobel laureates, including Milton Friedman. He has served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Texas at Austin, and he is a fellow of the IC2 Institute. Gary lives in Flatonia, Texas, with his 57,000-book library. He speaks to conferences and corporate groups and works to encourage innovation and entrepreneurial thinking on every continent and in every industry, for-profit and not-for-profit. He publishes the newsletter “Hoover’s World” and the video blog “Hoover Bits.”
