Rich Skrenta

Notable work and positions

Common Crawl Foundation - Executive Director
Topix - co-founder and former CEO
Blekko - founder and former CEO
Open Directory Project (DMOZ) - co-founder

Biography

Rich Skrenta is a computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who serves as executive director of the Common Crawl Foundation, a nonprofit that maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data. He co-founded the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), a volunteer-edited web directory acquired by Netscape, and later co-founded and served as CEO of Topix LLC, a news aggregation and community forums company; in 2005, Skrenta and his co-founders sold a 75 percent stake in Topix to a newspaper consortium comprising Tribune, Gannett and Knight Ridder. He went on to found Blekko, a web search engine that received early investment from Marc Andreessen and was acquired by IBM in 2015 for its Watson computer system. Skrenta graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in computer science and earlier worked at Commodore Business Machines, Unix System Labs and Sun Microsystems.

Career highlights

• Co-founding Topix · Built a top-15 U.S. news site providing aggregated local news and discussion, majority-acquired by Tribune, Gannett and Knight Ridder in 2005.
• Founding Blekko · Launched a web search engine later acquired by IBM for its Watson AI system in 2015.
• Executive Director, Common Crawl Foundation · Leads the nonprofit maintaining an open, freely available archive of web crawl data.