People associated with
Topix.net

Chris Tolles is the CEO and co-founder of Topix. Prior to Topix, Chris co-founded and was the VP of Marketing at Spoke Software, an enterprise social networking startup.
Chris was one of the co-founders of NewHoo, which evolved into the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org afgter being acquired by Netscape. The Open Directory is the largest human edited directory of sites on the web. After getting acquired by Netscape, Chris ran marketing for Netscape Search and AOL Music.
Chris started his career at Sun Microsystems, where he spent eight years in a variety of sales, marketing and management positions, culminating in running marketing for the Network Security Products Group.
Chris has degrees in Computer Sceince and Economics from the University of California at San Diego, where he was awarded the Micahel Addison Award for best senior thesis and graduated as a Warren Scholar.
Chris sits on the advisory boards of several Silicon Valley startups including Spoke Software, Merchantcircle, and Fuzz, as well as being an advisor to Webmasterworld, Dealmaker Media and the Social Sciences Division of the University of California at San Diego

Rich Skrenta is the head of Blekko, a search engine, and is a prominent Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur. He has worked founding Open Directory Project, and Topix, among others. In 1982, the high-schooler wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines, which is generally considered first large-scale self-spreading computer virus.
Between 1989 and 1991, Rich worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix. Between 1991 and 1995 he worked at Unix System Labs and from 1996 to 1998 with IP-level encryption at Sun Microsystems. He later left Sun and became one of the founders of the Open Directory Project. He stayed onboard until 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 he went on to cofound Topix LLC, a Web 2.0 company in the news aggregation & forums market. In 2005, he and his fellow cofounders sold a 75% share of Topix to a newspaper consortium made up of Tribune, Gannett, and Knight Ridder.
Currently, he heads a new startup company, Blekko Inc, an internet search engine.
Skrenta was involved in the development of VMS Monster, an old MUD for VMS. VMS Monster was the inspiration for TinyMUD. He is also known for his role in developing TASS, an ancestor of tin, the popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems. In 1989 he started working on a multiplayer simulation game. In 1994 it was launched under the name Olympia as a pay-for-play game by Shadow Island Games.

: VP EngineeringSteve provides to Topix.net an engineering background in both shrink-wrapped and Internet software.Just prior to working at Topix ...

me a demo of Topix, a social news site, while I was at the WeMedia conference in Miami last week. | First off, a shout out to Amy Dalton of Topix ...

you can get the scores for a fee. Another good credit-checking resource is found at truecredit.com. | Steven R. Katz, a spokesman for TransUnion ...

University Law School and an LLM from Georgetown University Law School. | no photo for Michael MarksonMichael MarksonMichael brings to Topix. ...

Blake is currently a co-founder and VP of Product at StoryJumper, a privately funded start-up in Menlo Park, CA.
His tenure in the Silicon Valley includes senior positions at eBay/Paypal, AOL, and Apple. As the Director of Product Management for Topix, Blake oversees product strategy and implementation of all customer-facing features, including Topix’s highly successful forums platform. Prior to Topix, he led the program team responsible for PayPal’s flagship SMB payments platform.
Blake holds an MA from Stanford University and a BA from Colorado College. He is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

Arin is a Silicon Valley software engineer who’s currently the lead of Digg’s Core Infrastructure team. Before joining up with the folks at Digg Arin was lead developer of Fuzz.com where he created Blip.fm. Prior to Blip.fm/Fuzz.com he’s worked for various startups including Topix & Spoke Software.