Jeff Holden

CEO and Co-Founder

Prior to co-founding Pelago, Jeff spent almost 8 1/2 years (1997-2006) at Amazon.com. Most recently, Jeff was the Senior Vice President responsible for Amazon's consumer websites, worldwide. In this role, he oversaw the end-to-end customer experience (search, navigation, personalization, social computing, ordering, merchandising, automated email) as well as Amazon's online traffic initiatives (the Amazon Associates program, search engine optimization and search engine advertising) and the experimental platform that enabled Amazon to conduct quantitative experiments with regard to consumer behavior and measure incremental value of new initiatives.

Before moving into the website-focused role, Jeff was the Director of Supply Chain Optimization Systems at Amazon (for approximately 4 years). In this position, Jeff led the design and development of Amazon's unique and powerful forecasting, inventory planning, order fulfillment optimization and transactional purchasing systems. Jeff championed the idea that fulfillment planning could be sufficiently real-time that the order pipeline could be connected directly to the fulfillment planning engine to generate optimal plans from which shipping promises are made to the customer during the check-out process. The system realizing this vision was launched in 2001 and continues to power the Amazon site today.

Prior to Amazon, Jeff spent five years (1992-1997) at D. E. Shaw & Co., L.P. in New York. Jeff joined the firm as a software engineer; his first assignment was to help Jeff Bezos build and launch the Third Market strategy, one of Shaw's early sell-side strategies. After Bezos left to found Amazon.com, Jeff remained at Shaw as the Vice President responsible for the firm's front office software infrastructure.

Prior to joining D. E. Shaw & Co., Jeff earned his BS and MS in computer science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Darren Erik Vengroff, Ph.D.

CTO and Co-Founder

Darren has spent his career building world-class computer systems in a variety of domains.

Most recently he was a principal engineer at Amazon.com with responsibilities in personalization, automated email targeting, time-series analysis, content platform architecture, attribute-based navigation, search, and build and deployment systems.

Prior to Amazon.com, Darren spent six years at Goldman Sachs. As a vice president, he was responsible for trading and risk management systems that priced billions of dollars of derivative products for the fixed income, currency, and commodity businesses. See "On Top of the World: Goldman Sachs and the Culture of Risk," a cover story in The Economist that discusses the role these businesses played in distinguishing Goldman from its competitors.

Earlier in his career, Darren built the first microprocessor simulator capable of booting and running a commercial operating system under load. Prior to that, micro-architectural simulation was typically done on user code only, or on static instruction stream traces.

Darren holds an Sc.M. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Brown University, where he studied I/O-efficient algorithms with Jeff Vitter, and a B.S.E. in Computer Science with Highest Honors from Princeton University.

Jon Landers

Senior Vice President of Marketing & Community

Jon brings a diverse and successful career in marketing and branding to Pelago.

Jon has had the opportunity to work on major brand businesses for Fortune 500 companies including Quaker Oats, Sara Lee and RJR Foods, as well as for start-up businesses such as HomeGrocer.com, iMotors.com and Solagent. His non-profit marketing management experience includes positions as the Group Vice President of New Business Development and Corporate Marketing for the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. and the Deputy Director of Experience Music Project in Seattle, Washington.

Prior to joining Pelago, Jon was the Managing Principal of Economic Research Associates’ Washington. D.C. Office where he focused on market feasibility assessments and developing strategic marketing and business plans for both cultural and commercial attraction clients.

Jon has an MBA from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College.

Scott Hannan

Vice President of Business Development

Having been involved in the signing and launch of literally hundreds of wireless services in Asia Pac, Europe and North America, Scott Hannan is an expert on the design, implementation and monetization of consumer services utilizing the channel.

Prior to TAG Strategic Scott ran his own wireless consultancy following 5 years at Mobile 365 (acquired by Sybase, August 2006), the leading global provider of wireless services. During this period Scott built and managed all aspects of the US and Australian operations, as well as a period developing the Mobile 365 business in India, Singapore and South Africa. As Senior Director of Global Business Development, Scott established and managed over 20 wireless carrier relationships around the world as well as managed Mobile 365’s most important global clients including Fox, Google, MSN, Yahoo and Visa. Prior to Mobile 365 Scott founded Ilico, partly funded by Virgin Management Ltd and later acquired by Airmedia, a NYC based supplier of wireless services.

Starting out in hardware engineering, Scott spent 6 years working for DEC through the Compaq merger (now HP) as well as Cable and Wireless and IBM in the UK. Early on in this period, Scott swapped his static electricity mat for an apron each night, where along with a college friend he brought the Subway Sandwich business to Australia.