Rich Skrenta

Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (born June 6, 1967) is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the web search engine Blekko. He is currently the executive director of Common Crawl.

Skrenta Jr. was born in Pittsburgh on June 6, 1967. In 1982, at age 15, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II computers. It is widely believed to have been one of the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer viruses ever created. The virus displayed a short poem, among other things and was solved with a reboot.

In 1989, Skrenta graduated with a B.A. in computer science from Northwestern University.

Between 1989 and 1991, Skrenta worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix.

In 1989, Skrenta started working on a multiplayer simulation game. In 1994, it was launched under the name Olympia as a pay-for-play PBEM game by Shadow Island Games.

Between 1991 and 1995, Skrenta worked at Unix System Labs, and from 1995 to 1998 worked on encryption at Sun Microsystems. After he left Sun he became one of the founders of DMOZ. He stayed on board after the Netscape acquisition, and continued to work on the directory as well as Netscape Search, AOL Music, and AOL Shopping.

After his stint at AOL, Skrenta went on to cofound Topix LLC, a Web 2.0 company in the news aggregation and forums market.

In 2005, Skrenta and his fellow cofounders sold a 75% share of Topix to a newspaper consortium made up of Tribune, Gannett, and Knight Ridder.