Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and chief executive of Socket, a software supply chain security company in San Francisco, California. Before Socket he was a full-time open source maintainer, the author of WebTorrent and StandardJS, and a web security lecturer at Stanford University, where he studied.
YouTube Instant and Stanford
Aboukhadijeh studied at Stanford, where he taught computer science and did research in the human-computer interaction and computer security labs. In September 2010 he built YouTube Instant in three hours as a bet with his roommate. His site says it drew 1 million visitors in 10 days, and YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley offered him a job, which he turned down to finish his degree. He went on to work at Quora, Facebook, Yahoo, and Intel.
WebTorrent, StandardJS, and 100 npm Packages
In 2013 he started WebTorrent to bring BitTorrent to web browsers, and building it produced many small packages, including the StandardJS linter. He maintains more than 100 packages on npm, and from 2015 to 2018 he worked on open source full time and lived frugally. He described the appeal on GitHub's ReadME Project: I do the work once and humanity can benefit forever.
He also felt the weight of it. it’s humbling to think that if I screw this up, it’s going to affect many people
, he said. He noted that nearly every app is 90 to 95% open source code.
Founding Socket
He started Socket to detect and block supply chain attacks in open source packages, drawing on his time on the Node.js Foundation board and teaching web security at Stanford. When Socket raised a $60 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation in May 2026, he said: Teams are moving faster, more code is being generated, and more of what ends up in production now comes from outside the company.
Sources
- Feross Aboukhadijeh: About
- GitHub ReadME Project: Feross Aboukhadijeh
- Socket: About
- Socket: Socket Raises $60M Series C at a $1B Valuation (May 20, 2026)
Sources retrieved October 28, 2026.
