Rich Skrenta

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Rich Skrenta is often recognized as the man behind the first large-scale self-spreading computer virus. In 1982, the high-schooler wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines.

After college he worked for a number of companies including Commodore Business Machines, Unix System Labs and Sun Microsystems before co-founding the Open Directory Project. The project was eventually acquired by Netscape and he followed. He went on to work on a number of projects at the company including Netscape Search, AOL Music and AOL Shopping. After his time at AOL he founded Topix, a news aggregation & forums web application. After selling a 75% stake in the company he founded Blekko, an internet search engine that was in stealth mode as of 5/14/08.