Jeff Holden

Who is Jeff Holden?

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.