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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