Rich Skrenta is an experienced technologist and serial entrepreneur with a background in the search and social spaces. He was founder and CEO of Blekko, a web search engine; the Open Directory Project, an innovative community-edited search platform; Topix, a news aggregator combined with a social forum; and Tobiko, a restaurant recommendation platform. Rich has also run web-scale crawling and machine learning teams for several large organizations, including Meta, IBM Watson, and Netscape/America Online. Rich has a BA in Computer Science from Northwestern University, and is the author of a number of open-source software projects.