Open and shut

Today: David Moore, co-founder of Sludge.

Issue No. 215

Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz Saw the Future
David Moore

Sam Altman and Aaron Swartz Saw the Future

by David Moore

The inaugural class of the YCombinator venture capital/startup accelerator was photographed in 2005. YCombinator provides seed money and advice to promising startups in exchange for a percentage of equity, and has participated in the launch of more than 4,000 companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash, Twitch, Instacart, and Reddit. 

Nearly 20 years on, several of the young men in the photo are household names. One of them—on the right in the front row, arms crossed and standing beside YCombinator founder Paul Graham—is Sam Altman, CEO of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, maker of the controversial chatbot, ChatGPT. To Altman’s left in the photo is Aaron Swartz, the coder, activist, and writer who died by suicide in January 2013 at the age of 26. Altman was accepted into the first YC cohort for his startup Loopt, and Swartz for Infogami, which would later merge with Reddit. 

At the time of his death, Swartz was under indictment for downloading several million documents from the JSTOR online repository. He was a key target of the DOJ’s focus on “computer crime,” and even though JSTOR did not want him charged, Swartz was facing up to 35 years in prison, the victim of what his lawyers later called a publicity-driven case spearheaded by then-U.S. district attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant attorney Stephen Heymann, among others.

I was fortunate to call Aaron a friend. He made immense contributions in many fields: he was a co-creator of RSS, and an early architect of Creative Commons; he helped write Markdown; he was an effective activist for global digital freedoms, and so much more. As the co-founder of Demand Progress, he was instrumental in defeating SOPA, the blacklist bill that nearly derailed the internet. After this victory he gave a searing speech at the Freedom to Connect conference in 2012, the year before he died.