Andy Baio is an American technologist and blogger. He is the co-founder of the XOXO Festival, founder of Upcoming.org, a former CTO of Kickstarter and the author of the Waxy.org blog. In 2018, Baio was named a Kickstarter Fellow.
Internet Entrepreneur
In 2003, Baio launched Upcoming, a collaborative event calendar. The site was acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum in 2005 and Baio joined the company as the site's Technical Director. In 2007, Baio announced his departure from Yahoo. In September 2008, Baio joined the board of directors of Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website that helps people with project ideas to connect with an audience of potential funders. Baio later joined the staff as Chief Technical Officer in July 2009, stepping down in November 2010 to join Expert Labs. In June 2017, Baio joined Fuzzco as Technology Director. After Yahoo offered to sell the Upcoming domain back to Baio, he launched a Kickstarter campaign that hit its $30,000 goal in May 2014 to revive the site. Baio explained on the Kickstarter page, "Like many of the people that used it, I miss Upcoming. Nothing's come to replace it in the years since, and I have the same problems that motivated me to build it a decade ago -- I'm missing interesting events in my city and struggling to discover interesting events when I travel."
Media
Baio writes mostly about technology and media on Waxy.org, and publishes a sideblog known as Waxy Links. Baio often takes a stand against censorship on the Internet by hosting or linking to controversial content which some parties wish to suppress. This ranges from unauthorized mashups and other artwork where parody or fair-use claims are disputed to newsworthy video, such as that of 2008 United States vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin competing in a beauty pageant. Baio was one of the first bloggers to draw attention to the Star Wars Kid video, which depicted a teenager clumsily emulating martial arts moves for the camera. He was the first to identify the youth and interview him. In response to the negative attention the boy received, Baio later organized a fundraiser for him, raising $4,300 in a week. When the parody cartoon House of Cosbys was taken down from its original site due to a cease and desist letter from Bill Cosby's attorney, Baio placed the videos on his own website. Baio later received a similar cease and desist letter but refused to comply, citing fair use and decrying what he termed "a special kind of discrimination against amateur creators on the Internet", since Cosby had often been parodied in the mainstream media. In 2009, he produced Kind of Bloop, a chiptunetribute album commemorating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue. The album's cover was a pixel art version of the original album's cover, which consisted of a photograph taken by Jay Maisel. Attorneys representing Maisel demanded damages and that the resulting image be removed from the chiptune album, resulting in a settlement of $32,500 from Baio. Baio has also written for Wired magazine and The New York Times, and was a staffer on R. U. Sirius' online magazine GettingIt.com. Baio coined the term supercut in 2008, which in 2017 became known through the song "Supercut" by singer Lorde.
XOXO Festival
In early 2012, Baio and Andy McMillan co-founded the XOXO Festival, celebrating independent artists and technologists. The conference has been held in Portland, Oregon each September since 2012, except 2017. The conferences have been largely funded via prepaid tickets and other contributions, including via Kickstarter. The conferences have had an enthusiastic reception. Prominent bloggers and traditional media praised the "impressive list of speakers", and described it as a "crucible of trailblazing artists and developers".
