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Who

The founding editor of top tech blogs Gizmodo and Engadget, Rojas now runs an interactive record label called RCRD LBL.

Backstory

California-raised Rojas attended Harvard and started out as an associate editor at the tech publication Red Herring before the dotcom bust forced the mag to lay off its staff. Shortly after losing his job, he was hired by Nick Denton to launch Gizmodo.com, one of the very first tech blogs to appear on the scene. A place where geeks and other early adopters could indulge in their obsessive need for the latest info on the latest gadget, the site became one of the most successful blogs around before Rojas jumped ship in early 2004 to co-found a tech blog of his own. Teaming up with Jason Calacanis, the founder of Weblogs Inc., Rojas set up Engadget.com, relying on the same formula as Gizmodo. In this case, though, Rojas had equity, and in 2005, he hit pay dirt when AOL bought Weblogs Inc. for a reported $25 million. As part of the sale of Weblogs, Inc., Rojas signed an employment agreement with AOL and remained the site's editor-in-chief, relinquishing the job two years later.

Of note

In 2007, Rojas launched the vowel-eschewing RCRD LBL, an ad-supported virtual record label offering free music downloads. He remains a popular tech taking head, though, and is an occasional guest on TV shows where he can be found chattering about the latest gaming console or cell phone. It helps, of course, that he doesn't look like a typical nerd—his alt-rock hipster looks earned him the cover of New York magazine in February 2006 in an article about the "blog establishment." Suffice it to say he's one of the few bloggers who could appear on the cover of a magazine and not cause a massive drop in sales.

Personal

Rojas lives with his girlfriend, fellow blogger and ectomorph Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat.com, on the Lower East Side. Rojas and Fehrenbacher met in San Francisco during the dot-com boom.