Key People

Add to Watch List Share This Page

Email Page Flag This Page

Flag

Management

Rich Skrenta, Founder

Rich is a seasoned technology executive with nearly two decades of industry experience. He is currently CEO of Blekko, a disruptive general-purpose search engine. Previously, he was founder and CEO of Topix, the leading online news community. Prior to Topix, Rich headed up product development for a variety of products with AOL, including AOL Shopping, AOL Music and Netscape Search and Directory. Previous to AOL, Rich was the co-founder and CEO of NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape and renamed the Open Directory Project (ODP). The ODP is the world's largest human edited directory of the web and is still used by Google, Alexa, AOL, and many other companies. Rich was an engineering manager at Sun Microsystems prior to NewHoo and has also had development roles at Unix Systems Labs and the Amiga UNIX Group at Commodore Business Machines.

Rich holds a patent in network security and has authored many well-known pioneering software efforts, including some of the first multi-user online games. Rich graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Computer Science.