Ali Aydar

Ali Aydar
Occupation	CEO, Sporcle
Known for	early Napster employee, SNOCAP executive, imeem executive

Ali Aydar is a computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer at Sporcle.

He is best known as an early employee and key technical contributor at the original Napster, the file-sharing service created by Shawn Fanning in 1999, and at SNOCAP, the digital rights and content management startup Fanning founded after Napster. He was also chief operating officer of imeem, which acquired SNOCAP in 2008.

Aydar's experiences working at Napster were documented in two books and one documentary film: Joseph Menn's definitive Napster biography, All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster, Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, and Alex Winter's film Downloaded.

Ali Aydar was born to a Turkish family in Richmond, Virginia and grew up in Napoleon, Michigan. In high school, he ran a Bulletin Board System by the name of "Awesome Fred's BBS." After high school, he attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he majored in mathematics and computer science. While there, Aydar was a contributor to the Free Internet Chess Server, an open-source project that enabled people to play online chess for free. This experience led to Aydar co-founding online chess startup chess.net with John Fanning, the uncle of Napster creator Shawn Fanning, in 1996.

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