Ellen Siminoff Joins MoCo Board

I’m very pleased to announce that Ellen Siminoff is joining the Mozilla Corporation board of directors. She joins John Lilly, Reid Hoffman and me on this board. Ellen brings a deep understanding of the consumer Internet, experience at growing and operating organizations of around our size, an entrepreneurial spirit, experience with Board-level responsibilities and a commitment to using these talents in the service of Mozilla’s mission.

I’ve been impressed with Ellen’s ability to figure out what a traditional profit-oriented start-up would be likely to do in a given situation, and then to recognize when those actions might be modified to reflect Mozilla DNA and to move forward in a Mozilla-like way. Those of us who live with Mozilla are used to doing this. It’s not so easy to find people with deep experience in the Internet industry who take to this so quickly. I’m looking forward to having Ellen’s perceptiveness and experience on the MoCo board.

Ellen’s CV is below. We’ll schedule an Air Mozilla broadcast with Ellen before too long so you can talk to her directly.

Ellen Siminoff is President and CEO of Shmoop University, an educational website. She is also Chairman of Efficient Frontier, a pioneer of dynamic search engine marketing management services. She worked with the founders to evolve Efficient Frontier from a groundbreaking idea into the leading Search Engine Marketing agency in the world with business in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and Latin America.Prior to Efficient Frontier, Mrs. Siminoff had six adventurous years s 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!, Mrs. Siminoff worked for the Los Angeles Times as electronic classifieds manager, where she developed strategy and implemented the newspaper’s own on-line businesses as well as a joint venture of Career Path with 5 newspaper companies.With her husband, David, Mrs. Siminoff founded EastNet, a global syndicate barter company distributing television programming to 14 emerging market countries in exchange for advertising time. She graduated Stanford’s Graduate School of Business with an MBA in 1993 after having completed a summer in corporate finance at Salomon Brothers. Mrs. Siminoff worked as a human resources management consultant in New York after graduating from Princeton University with a bachelor’s degree in Economics.Currently, she serves on the board of directors for US Auto Parts, an Internet retailer with more than 550,000 top-rated discount car parts; Journal Communications, a diversified media and communications company operating businesses in newspaper publishing, radio and television broadcasting, telecommunications, and printing services; and glu mobile, a leading global publisher of mobile games. In 2005 she was one of eight industry professionals named “Masters of Information” by Forbes magazine. In addition, she is on the boards of directors and advisors of a number of private companies including 4info.net, the leader in mobile SMS marketing. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, including Ad-Tech, Search Engine Strategies, and Supernova.