New Appointment for TripAdvisor
NOVEMBER 1, 2007. Ken Surdan has joined Tripadvisors management team as senior vice president of technology, to lead the company's rapidly expanding engineering and IT teams.
TripAdvisor has doubled its workforce in the past year, while also doubling the amount of content on the site, growing from 5 million to 10 million reviews and opinions. "We're thrilled that Ken has embraced the challenge to help us deliver the best possible tools and user experience to our travelers," said Steve Kaufer, founder and CEO of TripAdvisor. "Ken has a history with startups where he's proven that he can deliver robust technology platforms on time and under budget, while growing traffic and performance exponentially."
Surdan comes to TripAdvisor from Smart Bargains, where he served as COO/CTO and led initiatives to radically increase reliability and scalability of core systems and improve customer satisfaction. Prior to Smart Bargains, Ken was CTO at National Leisure Group, where he led the technology strategy through a period of extremely high growth. Ken started his web career at Send.com as vice president of technology. Prior to the dot-com revolution, Ken held technology leadership positions at The Stride Rite Corporation, The Timberland Company and Digital Equipment Corporation. He holds an undergraduate degree from Boston University and an MBA from Babson College.
"TripAdvisor has established itself as an outstanding technology culture, with a hand-picked team of top software engineers who have built a remarkable product and business," said Ken Surdan, senior vice president of technology at TripAdvisor. "I'm very excited to join such an accomplished technology team. I believe TripAdvisor is at the forefront of the user-generated content revolution and is setting the standard for excellence in this space and I look forward to being a part of the team, writing the next chapter of this success story."
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