William J Lynch, Jr

Business career

William J. Lynch, Jr. became Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble, Inc., in March 2010, and was appointed to the B&N Board of Directors in the fall of 2011. He was previously President of Barnes & Noble.com, responsible for the company’s eCommerce operations. Lynch joined Barnes & Noble from HSNi, where he was Executive Vice President of Marketing and General Manager of HSN.com. From 2004 to 2008, he was Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Gifts.com, a wholly owned subsidiary of IAC. He also served as VP for HSN, running the growing HSN.com e-commerce site. From 2000-2004, Lynch was Vice President and General Manager, eCommerce, for Palm Inc., where he oversaw Palm’s Web properties, including: Palm.com, the Palm Online Store, the Palm Software Connection and the Palm.Net wireless ISP. His earlier career included brand management positions at Seagram Universal and Guinness.

Under Lynch's leadership at Barnes & Noble, a Silicon Valley presence was established in Palo Alto in 2008 to develop the Nook hardware devices (tablets and eReaders), software, cloud services, and operations center.

Lynch has been responsible for leading the creation of all of the Nook products and software, beginning with the original Nook eReader (code named Bravo). He was responsible for the first Android color tablet ever made, Nook Color, introduced in November 2010. It was positioned as a color eReader, and established the small color tablet category that has grown to become the largest market segment of color tablets.

In 2014, Lynch was appointed as CEO of Savant Systems LLC, headquartered in Hyannis, Massachusetts. As of September 27, 2016 Lynch is no longer the CEO of Savant, but will remain on the board in an advisory capacity.

Education

Lynch graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in economics. He received his MBA from the Columbia Business School.