Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (born June 6, 1967) is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the web search engine blekko.

Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II computers.

[citation needed] After his stint at AOL, Skrenta went on to cofound Topix LLC, a Web 2.0 company in the news aggregation and forums market.

[5] In 2005, Skrenta and his fellow cofounders sold a 75% share of Topix to a newspaper consortium made up of Tribune, Gannett, and Knight Ridder.

[6] Blekko received early investment support from Marc Andreessen[7] and began public beta testing on November 1, 2010.