Anil Dash has been writing the same website since 1999. That fact — a personal weblog started while he was an independent technology consultant and still publishing as anildash.com — is the spine everything else hangs on. He is the person the tech industry calls when it needs someone who was actually there: first employee of Six Apart, the company whose Movable Type and TypePad professionalized blogging; founder of the White House-adjacent Expert Labs; co-creator of the artifact now recognized as the first NFT; the CEO who turned Fog Creek Software into Glitch, voluntarily recognized a union, and sold the company to Fastly; and, improbably, the New York Times's go-to "Prince scholar."
The blogger
Born September 5, 1975 to Odia parents who had emigrated from India, Dash grew up near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In his telling to Minnesota Public Radio's The Current, he dropped out of college because the early web — and specifically the Prince fan community forming on newsgroups, Prodigy, and AOL around 1993 — was more compelling. His bios have never bothered to polish that: "never graduated from college" is a fixed line. After two years as a new media developer at the Village Voice (2001-2003), he was hired in 2003 as the first employee of Six Apart, the Trotts' San Mateo startup behind Movable Type, TypePad, and later Vox and LiveJournal. As vice president and chief evangelist until 2009 he was the public voice of the professional-blogging era — the man in the comments during the May 2004 Movable Type 3.0 licensing revolt, whose "Moving Forward" post even competitor-to-be Matt Mullenweg praised for its honesty.
The civic turn
In late 2009 he pivoted from selling blogging to wiring it into government. Expert Labs, launched that November inside the American Association for the Advancement of Science with a $500,000 MacArthur Foundation grant, grew out of discussions with the Obama White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy. The pitch, in his words to AAAS, was inversion: lots of attention went to how government uses technology to talk to citizens; Expert Labs would build "technology that helps government listen to citizens." By April 2010 it was running the OSTP's call for scientists' input on federal technology priorities through ThinkTank, the open-source tool Gina Trapani had built inside the project. ThinkTank became ThinkUp — a social-media analytics company Dash and Trapani co-founded, used by the Obama White House, and shuttered in June 2016. In parallel he co-founded Activate, a media-and-technology strategy consultancy, with Michael J. Wolf in 2009, and spent the decade as a technology advisor to the White House Office of Digital Strategy (2012-2023), later co-chairing the Obama Foundation's digital advisory council.
The builder years
Two 2014-2015 artifacts define his maker record. At Rhizome's Seven on Seven hackathon at the New Museum on May 3, 2014, he and artist Kevin McCoy demonstrated "monetized graphics" — registering McCoy's animation Quantum on the Namecoin blockchain to prove a digital artwork could have provenance. Dash bought the first one for the four dollars in his pocket, Vice reported. That prototype, Monegraph, is now widely credited as the first NFT; Quantum sold at Sotheby's for $1.47 million in June 2021, and the Webby Awards gave both men a 2022 Lifetime Achievement award for the groundwork. The twist is that Dash had already publicly disowned the market it seeded — his Atlantic essay "NFTs Were Supposed to Protect Artists. They Don't." explains the intent was artist control, not speculation. With Trapani he also built Makerbase, an "IMDb for apps" crediting the people behind digital projects — explicitly including women and people of color — launched August 4, 2015 at the first White House Demo Day.
Glitch
In December 2016 Joel Spolsky handed him the CEO job at Fog Creek Software — the seventeen-year-old incubator behind Stack Overflow (whose board Dash sat on from 2012 to 2022) and Trello. The same announcement launched Gomix, the remixable app platform that became Glitch. He renamed the company Glitch, Inc. in September 2018, raised $30 million, grew it to roughly 1.8 million monthly users, and in March 2020 did something no tech startup had done: voluntarily recognized his workers' union (CWA Local 1101) rather than fight it. The collective bargaining agreement signed in February 2021 was the first by white-collar tech workers in the US. Fastly acquired Glitch on May 19, 2022; Dash became VP of developer experience. The coda is bittersweet: as CEO he announced in May 2025 that Glitch would end app hosting on July 8, 2025, and he left Fastly that June. He has since co-founded antitech, a firm promising to help organizations build "good, thoughtful technology."
The purple scholar
Running underneath the whole career is a second life. Dash has been inside Prince's online fandom since the early 1990s — he says he traded AIM chats with the man himself — and after Prince's 2016 death he became a public steward of that legacy: the "#Transformed" Eyeo talk on Prince's 58th birthday, the Prince Online Museum built with the artist's former webmasters, the rescued 1993 liner-notes draft and 1996 "Message from the Artist" letter, the symbol-font floppy recovered with Adafruit, and a guest spot on the official Prince podcast. The New York Times called him a "Prince scholar" in 2022. He and Lin-Manuel Miranda also built the "New Jack Swing 101" Spotify playlist in January 2018 — one of the platform's most popular that year.
What he argues
The beliefs are consistent enough to read as one position. Values are embedded in software, so builders are accountable for them (Observer, 2012). The social web traded away self-owned identity, interoperability, portability, and pseudonymity for billion-scale networks — a loss he itemized in "The Web We Lost" (2012) and "The Lost Infrastructure of Social Media" (2016), while insisting the pendulum swings back. Government's job is to listen (Expert Labs). Creators deserve ownership and control (Monegraph; Prince). Workers deserve a union if they want one (Glitch). And in "Endgame for the Open Web" (March 2026) he argues the attack has gone existential — AI scraping without consent, closed APIs, dead norms like robots.txt — and that 2026 may decide whether the open web survives at all.
What the record does not settle
The seams are preserved above: the "first employee" framing versus a 2003 hire into a 2001 company; the October-versus-December 2016 Fog Creek start; Expert Labs' undated wind-down; the uneven public credit split on the first NFT; antitech's undocumented model; and Glitch's unresolved afterlife. His early Prince-fan history is self-reported, and one much-cited Vanity Fair profile has no stable URL. None of this changes the throughline — a blogger who kept his own domain while helping build, and then critique, nearly every era of the social web.
This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.