Founder Profile
Aaron Swartz
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Aaron Swartz?
Aaron Swartz is a founder of Reddit, Inc., which was founded in 2005 with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian.
- Company founded
- Reddit, Inc.
- Founded
- 2005
- Co-founders
- Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian
Background
Aaron Swartz was a programmer who co-authored the RSS 1.0 specification as a teenager and founded Infogami, which merged with Reddit in late 2005.
Founding Story
Aaron Swartz joined Reddit when his startup Infogami merged with it in 2005 and helped rewrite the site in Python using his web.py framework. He left after the 2006 Conde Nast acquisition and became an internet freedom activist. He died in 2013 while facing federal charges over downloading academic articles from JSTOR.
Aaron Swartz was born in 1986 in Highland Park. Education: Stanford University; North Shore Country Day School.
Aaron Hillel Swartz was born on November 8, 1986 and died on January 11, 2013. As a programmer he helped develop the RSS web feed format, the technical architecture of Creative Commons and the Python web framework web.py.