Ellen Siminoff is president and CEO of Shmoop University, an educational publishing company that aims to reduce the friction in learning. Shmoop’s mission is to distribute its curriculum and test preparation materials across all platforms in all corners of the world. The company communicates with a distinctive edgy voice, which has been roundly lauded by educators, students, and parents alike. Shmoop grew from a singular personal vision to now encompass tens of millions of unique visitors and dozens of awards. Shmoop’s products are licensed to high schools, libraries, and school districts and distributed through the website www.shmoop.com.
Ellen was president and CEO of Efficient Frontier, a pioneer of dynamic search engine marketing management services. She joined near the company’s founding and built Efficient Frontier to $1 billion in spend under management. Efficient Frontier was sold to Adobe for $425 million. Prior to Efficient Frontier, Ellen had six adventurous years as a founding executive at Yahoo. During her tenure, she led business development (VP, business development and planning), corporate development (senior VP, corporate development), and the small business and entertainment business units, representing approximately 25% of Yahoo’s revenue (senior VP, entertainment and small business).
Among other boards and advisory relationships, Ellen served on the boards of directors for Solarwinds, a leading provider of downloadable, enterprise-class network management software; Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser; and Zynga, the world’s leading provider of social games. In 2005, she was one of eight industry professionals named “Masters of Information” by Forbes magazine.
Ellen graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business with an MBA and Princeton University with a BA in economics.