Board Members

David Karnstedt - Efficient Frontier
Dr. Venky Harinarayan - Cambrian Ventures
Chris Moore - Redpoint Ventures
Dr. Anil Kamath - Efficient Frontier
Ellen Siminoff - Efficient Frontier

David Karnstedt

As President and CEO, David Karnstedt leads Efficient Frontier's overall strategy and is responsible for the management and operations for the company. He also serves on Efficient Frontier's Board of Directors. Before joining the company in 2009, he served as Executive-in-Residence for Redpoint Ventures, an investor in the company.

Prior to Redpoint, he served as Senior Vice President of Yahoo!'s North American Sales with responsibility for more than $3 billion in revenue.  At Yahoo!, Karnstedt successfully led the integration of the Search and Display sales teams into one central unit and helped establish Yahoo! as a recognized leader in both display and search marketing.

Karnstedt's experience includes several industry firsts. Prior to Yahoo!, David led the Direct Sales team at Overture Services, the company that pioneered the paid search industry and was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003. He also served as Vice President and General Manager of Alta Vista, where he was responsible for the consumer business and helped shape product development and marketing strategies that leveraged the auctions-based search approach. Prior to Alta Vista, David served as Western Advertising Director at Wired Digital where he helped to develop some of the first advertising models on the Web. He is also active in the industry, having served on both the Advertising Council and Interactive Advertising Association’s Boards of Directors.

Karnstedt holds a BA in Speech Communication with a Minor in Business from the University of Illinois.

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Dr. Venky Harinarayan

Venky Harinarayan is Co-Founder of Kosmix, a leading Web Categorization Engine. Prior to founding Kosmix in 2004, Harinarayan founded Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, with Anand Rajaraman in 2000. Cambrian's investments include Efficient Frontier, Transformic (acquired by GOOG), Kaltix (acquired by GOOG), Mobissimo, Kosmix, Aster Data, Yousendit.com, TheFind, and Neoteris (acquired by JNPR). Previously, Harinarayan was a General Manager at Amazon.com, where he worked with Founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, to create Amazon's search and marketplace business. Harinarayan came to Amazon in 1998 through the $250 Million acquisition of Junglee, a pioneering shopping search engine company that he co-founded.

Harinarayan has a PhD from Stanford University in computer science. He received ACM SIGMOD's "Best Paper" Award in 1996 and ACM SIGMOD's "Test-of-Time" Award in 2006. He also holds multiple patents including one for the invention of the technology underlying Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

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Chris Moore

Chris Moore is a Partner with Redpoint Ventures focusing on consumer Internet, online marketing and business services opportunities. Prior to joining Redpoint, Chris evaluated Internet opportunities for IVP, a firm he joined in 1999. He currently serves on the board of directors of DailyStrength, eBureau, Vuze, and Efficient Frontier and is actively involved with Redpoint's investment in Oodle. Chris also led Redpoint's investment in Right Media (acquired by Yahoo!) and was actively involved with Redpoint's investment in MySpace.

Prior to joining IVP, Chris led business development efforts for wine.com, the online wine retailer, and held various product management positions with Peapod, the pioneering online grocery shopping service provider. Previously, Chris evaluated and executed Internet and media investments for Ameritech. He began his career as a financial analyst in the mergers and acquisitions and leveraged buyout groups of Wasserstein Perella & Co.

Chris holds a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics from Dartmouth College and an M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

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Dr. Anil Kamath

As the Co-Founder of Efficient Frontier, Anil Kamath is the primary architect of the company's core technology and algorithms. He is responsible for guiding the company's overall technology vision, focusing on creating innovative technologies that leverage Efficient Frontier's optimization platform.

Prior to co-founding Efficient Frontier, Kamath founded eBoodle, an ecommerce company providing comparison shopping and digital wallet services. eBoodle was acquired by Bizrate in 2000. At Bizrate, he managed the San Francisco Bay Area office and was responsible for Bizrate's contextual advertising product. Prior to founding eBoodle, Kamath was Vice President of International Equity Trading at D.E. Shaw & Co., a hedge fund that specializes in using quantitative models for program trading. He has authored multiple technical papers in the area of applying algorithms to SEM and also holds several patents.

Kamath has a B.Tech. from IIT and an MS and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

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Ellen Siminoff

Ellen Siminoff is Chairman of Efficient Frontier, a pioneer of dynamic Search Engine Marketing (SEM) management services. She worked with the founders to evolve Efficient Frontier from a groundbreaking idea into the leading SEM firm in the world with business in the U.S., Asia, Europe and Latin America.

Siminoff is currently President and CEO of Shmoop, a new media learning company. Shmoop offers students and teachers deep, fun, and engaging online supplements to classroom curriculum.

Prior to Efficient Frontier, Siminoff had six adventurous years as a founding executive at Yahoo!. During her tenure, she led Business Development (VP, Business Development and Planning), Corporate Development (SVP, Corporate Development) and eventually ran the Small Business and Entertainment Business units, representing approximately 25% of Yahoo's revenue (SVP, Entertainment and Small Business). Before Yahoo!, Siminoff worked for the Los Angeles Times as Electronic Classifieds Manager, where she developed strategy and implemented the newspaper's own online businesses as well as a joint venture of Career Path with five newspaper companies.

With her husband, David, Siminoff founded EastNet, a global syndicate barter company distributing television programming to 14 emerging market countries in exchange for advertising time. Siminoff worked as a Human Resources Management Consultant in New York after graduating from Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in Economics.

Among other boards and advisory relationships, Siminoff serves on the board of directors for US Auto Parts, an Internet retailer with more than 550,000 top-rated discount car parts, 4INFO, a utility for mobile phones providing users the means to search, discover, and receive relevant information and content, and Journal Communications, a diversified media and communications company operating businesses in newspaper publishing, radio and television broadcasting, telecommunications and printing services. In 2005 she was one of eight industry professionals named "Masters of Information" by Forbes magazine.

Siminoff graduated Stanford's Graduate School of Business with an MBA in 1993 after having completed a summer in corporate finance at Salomon Brothers. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, including ad:tech, Search Engine Strategies and Supernova.

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