About Anil Dash

Hi, I'm Anil Dash. I’m a tech entrepreneur and writer, and someone who's trying to make technology more responsible. I've been creating Internet technologies for two decades, and writing on my blog here that whole time, focused on ensuring that technology's transformative impact on society, media, the arts, labor, government and culture is as positive as possible.

While my work is grounded in tech, it is deeply connected to policy, culture, art, labor, urbanism, social justice and other domains that tech has historically overlooked. You'll find plenty of digressions into policy, popular culture and media here on this blog as well. You can reach me at a@anildash.com.

Full Bio

Anil Dash is recognized advocate for more humane, inclusive and ethical technology through his work as an entrepreneur, activist and writer, honored by the Webby Awards with its lifetime achievement award in 2022. Today, he leads Fastly's Developer Experience team, which provides the tools that the world's most innovative developers use to build experiences that make the internet better for billions of users every day. Dash joined Fastly with its acquisition of Glitch in 2022, where he served as CEO of the friendly coding community beloved by millions of developers.

Dash also serves as a board member for organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the pioneering nonprofit organization defending digital privacy and expression, and the Lower East Side Girls Club, which serves girls and families in need in New York City. Previously, Dash was an advisor to the Obama White House’s Office of Digital Strategy, was co-chair of the Obama Foundation's tech advisory council, served for a decade on the board of Stack Overflow, the world’s largest community for coders, served on the board of The Markup, the leading nonprofit investigative newsroom pushing for tech accountability, and was a founding board member of the Data & Society Research Institute, which researches the cutting edge of tech's impact on society. In 2009, he led a MacArthur-backed research project carrying out pioneering research on social media's impact on public policy making. And during his tenure as CEO of Glitch, the company became the first tech startup ever to voluntarily recognize its workers' union.

Described by The New Yorker as a “blogging pioneer”, and by the New York Times as a "Prince scholar", his personal website has been cited in hundreds of newspapers, academic papers and journals. As a writer and artist, Dash was a contributing editor and monthly columnist for Wired, has written for publications including The Atlantic, Rolling Stone and Businessweek, co-created one of the first implementations of the technology later known as NFTs, had his work exhibited in the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and collaborated with Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda on one of the most popular Spotify playlists of 2018.

Back when Twitter was relevant, Time named @anildash one of the best accounts on Twitter, and he is the only person ever retweeted by both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Prince, a succinct summarization of Dash’s interests. Dash has also been a keynote speaker and guest in a broad range of media and events ranging from the Aspen Ideas Festival to Desus and Mero's late-night show, and has guested on a surprisingly large number of your favorite podcasts.

Dash lives in New York City with his wife Alaina Browne and their child and two dogs. Like most people, he has never played a round of golf, drank a cup of coffee, filed a patent, or graduated from college.

Requisite disclaimer

None of the organizations mentioned here are responsible for anything you see on this site. As this site has been published continuously for over two decades, many pieces included here may not reflect my current views or the ways I would communicate today.

Selected Press & Media

You can check out many of my podcast appearances in my archives. One good starting point is my interview with Krista Tippet for "On Being", recorded in November 2016.

On Being Studios · Anil Dash — Tech’s Moral Reckoning

I hosted Function, a podcast about how technology shapes culture and communications, for two seasons where we interviewed key figures on topics ranging from ensuring the safety of voting technologies to systemic bias in sentencing software to how dance culture gets appropriate by video games.
For The Atlantic, I wrote about NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, including the first demonstration I did with Kevin McCoy of using blockchain technologies in this way.
As a columnist and contributing editor for Wired, I regularly wrote for the magazine in 2011-2012, and those columns are archived here.
I've guested on a broad range of podcasts, including Another Round, Switched on Pop, the late Reggie Ossie's legendary Combat Jack show, The Ezra Klein show, Vox Media's "The Weeds", Bloomberg's "Masters in Business", Debbie Millman's Design Observer, Crooked Media's "With Friends Like These", and you can probably search through your favorite podcast app for lots of other shows you might like.
Some older press stories you might enjoy include this brief 2014 Vanity Fair profile of me, a 2010 Fast Company profile, a New York Times interview from 2010, and these Big Think video interviews I did back in 2009.