Leadership Team
Elie Seidman -- Co-Founder and CEO
Elie is the CEO of Oyster.com and one of its co-founders.
Elie has been an entrepreneur nearly since graduating from college in 1997. After spending a year working for Trilogy in Austin, Texas (where he and Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures first met), Elie moved back to the East Coast and was involved in the founding of his first company, Wired Business, a telecom services company funded by Norwest Venture Partners. In the fall of 2000, Elie founded Epana and, as its president and CEO, grew the company to more than 400 employees between 2002 and the end of 2005. Elie departed Epana in the spring of 2006 and spent a year as a venture partner at Lime Rock Partners, a private equity fund based in Westport, Conn. Since Oyster.com launched, Elie has made frequent TV appearances as a hotel industry expert.
Elie resides in New York. He received his B.S.E. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ariel Charytan -- Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer
As Chief Creative Officer at Oyster, Ariel conceives feature ideas and strategy for the company.
Ariel has been an entrepreneur nearly since graduating from college. Prior to co-founding Oyster, Ariel was COO and co-founder of Epana, a company he built with Elie Seidman to more than 400 employees between 2000 until his departure in 2008.
Ariel lives in New York with his wife and three kids. He received his bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, in psychology.
Eytan Seidman -- Co-Founder and Vice President of Product
As vice president of product at Oyster, Eytan leads product management, planning, design, and usability of the Oyster.com site.
Prior to Oyster, Eytan was a principal program manager lead on Microsoft's Live Search team (now Bing.com), a position he held for four and a half years. This team was responsible for the vision, planning, and specifications that power the web search software for Live Search. This includes all aspects of Live's core ranking and relevance measurement. Earlier in his career at Microsoft, Eytan worked as a program manager on the Microsoft CRM team, driving the program management of functionality related to the core user experience and integration with back-office applications.
Eytan lives in New York with his wife Ilana. He received degrees in computer science and history from the University of Pennsylvania.
Michael Cirello -- Vice President of Engineering
As vice president of engineering, Michael leads the technology development team for Oyster.
Michael joined Oyster in early 2009 and has led the engineering team since the summer of 2009. Prior to Oyster, Michael lived in Silicon Valley where he was working as the co-founder of a startup. Prior to his startup adventure, Michael was senior engineer at Raytheon working on missile guidance systems (which makes him, we think, a legitimate rocket scientist). He began his career at Microsoft where he worked on the User Experience team in Microsoft Office.
Michael lives in New Jersey with his wife Christine. Michael received his B.S.E. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
