Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Kaufer co-founded TripAdvisor in 2000 with the mission to help travellers around the world plan and have the perfect trip. Under Kaufer's leadership, TripAdvisor has grown into the world's largest travel site, with more than 50 million unique monthly visitors, 20 million members and over 60 million reviews and opinions.

Kaufer has also built TripAdvisor, Inc., which includes 19 other travel brands, and has expanded the TripAdvisor brand into 30 countries. Kaufer and his co-founders sold TripAdvisor to InterActive Corporation in 2004, which later spun off its travel businesses to Expedia, Inc. TripAdvisor was owned by Expedia until December 2011, when it spun off to become its own publically traded company.

Prior to co-founding TripAdvisor, Kaufer was president of CDS, Inc., an independent software vendor, and co-founder and vice president of engineering of CenterLine Software, where he led the development of several award-winning programming environments.

Kaufer, winner of the 2005 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, holds several software patents and has spoken at dozens of travel and high-tech conferences worldwide. He is on the board of directors at Glassdoor; CarGurus (www.cargurus.com); and the Caring For Carcinoid Foundation (www.caringforcarcinoid.org), a non-profit charity dedicated to finding a cure for Carcinoid and Neuroendocrine cancers.

Kaufer has a degree in computer science from Harvard University.