Margo Georgiadis was named Ancestry CEO and appointed to the Board of Directors in May 2018. Prior to joining Ancestry, Margo served as CEO of Mattel, the global leader in play, learning and development. Previously she was the President of Americas at Google, overseeing commercial operations and advertising sales, and before that was Google’s Vice President of Global Sales Operations, leading the teams that enabled the successful commercialization of Google’s products and the development of new businesses in local and commerce. She has also held leadership roles as COO of Groupon, EVP of US Card Services and CMO of Discover Financial Services, and was a partner at McKinsey in London and Chicago. Margo has championed organizations that inspire girls to pursue education opportunities and careers in STEM, including Girls 4 Science and Made with Code. She is a recipient of the Forbes “Excellence Award in Innovation,” the POW! Womenetics “Purposeful Women Award,” and was named to Crain’s “Most Powerful Women in Business” and Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” lists. Margo serves on the Board of Directors of McDonald’s and the Ad Council. She earned a BA in Economics and an MBA from Harvard.
Howard Hochhauser joined Ancestry in 2009 as Chief Financial Officer and in February 2012 added the position of Chief Operating Officer. Howard also served as interim CEO of Ancestry from October 2017 to May 2018 while the Board conducted a comprehensive search for a permanent CEO. During his tenure, Howard has helped lead the Company’s initial 2009 public offering, its go-private transaction in 2012, seven acquisitions and all of its public equity and debt financings. He was part of the team that helped grow the company from approximately $200 million in revenue in 2008, to more than $1 billion in revenue in 2017, a compound annual growth rate of over 21%. Prior to joining Ancestry, Howard served as Chief Financial Officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and earlier in his career was a Vice President of Equity Research at Bear Stearns & Co. and a Staff Accountant at KPMG Peat Marwick. Howard has received numerous awards, including Best CEO of 2018 by the Utah Technology Council, #1 Internet industry CFO of 2012 by Institutional Investor magazine and CFO of the year in 2012 by Utah Business Magazine. He serves on the boards of the Utah Technology Council, Silicon Slopes and on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of Envision Utah. He is a Certified Public Accountant and holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University and a B.S. from Boston University.
Carla S. Newell has served as Chief Legal Officer and Chief Risk Officer for Ancestry since September 2016. She has worked with companies covering a wide range of sectors including cyber security, enterprise software and services, ecommerce and social media, witnessing the evolution in business models across these sectors and their impact on more traditional businesses. Prior to joining Ancestry, Carla spent more than a decade as Operating General Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), a leading growth equity investor, where she led legal, investor relations and fundraising for the firm and its multi-billion dollar funds. Among TCV's portfolio companies are many of the world's most successful and recognizable consumer technology brands, including Expedia, Facebook, Fandango, Netflix, Spotify, and Zillow. Additionally, Carla is an expert in structuring and negotiating complex business, investment and strategic transactions, including M&A. Prior to Technology Crossover Ventures she spent 15 years working with high growth technology companies as a Partner at two leading technology focused law firms, Gunderson Dettmer Stough Villeneuve Franklin & Hachigian LLP and Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich. Carla earned a Juris Doctorate from The University of Michigan Law School and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago.
Nat Natarajan has served as our Executive Vice President and Chief Product and Technology Officer since February 2017. Prior to Ancestry, Nat held executive positions in technology and product development at Intuit and PayPal. He was also one of the early members on the team that founded Travelocity.com, totaling more than 20 years of experience building highly innovative products and successful teams. At PayPal, Nat managed and led significant growth during his tenure. He was a key executive in PayPal’s merchant services business that was about 60 percent of PayPal’s revenues in 2014. He led global engineering, operations and platforms teams at PayPal. As Chief Technology Officer and senior vice president of product management and engineering for Intuit’s Consumer Tax Group, Natarajan helped to shape their product and technology roadmap, accelerate the pace of innovation and build a world-class product leadership team. He speaks regularly at technology forums and has served on multiple panels related to product innovation, agile technologies and leading transformations. Natarajan has a Master of Science degree in industrial engineering from Clemson University and a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from Jawaharlal Nehru Technology University in India.
Evan Wittenberg has served as Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Ancestry since July 2017. He oversees the company’s People and Places team, which is responsible for all HR functions including talent acquisition and development, total rewards, facilities and leadership development. Wittenberg has an extensive track record of helping world-class organizations grow and foster their talent while evolving their cultures to support continued expansion. Prior to Ancestry, Wittenberg served as Chief People Officer at Box, having led the company’s Human Resources function through explosive growth and a public listing in 2015. In his leadership role, he oversaw all recruiting and talent development initiatives, in addition to compensation and benefits, performance management and succession planning. Prior to Box, Wittenberg was the Chief Talent Officer for HP; created and ran the Global Leadership Development function at Google; was Director of the Graduate Leadership Program at The Wharton School; and was part of the cultural integration of two world class academic medical centers which created New York Presbyterian Hospital – The University Hospital of Columbia and Cornell.
Ken Chahine has served as our Executive Vice President and General Manager for AncestryDNA, LLC since April 2015. He joined the Company as General Manager and Senior Vice President for AncestryDNA, LLC in July of 2011. Prior to joining us, he held several positions, including as Chief Executive Officer of Avigen, a biotechnology company in the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Utah, and at Parke-Davis Pharmaceuticals (currently Pfizer). Ken also teaches a course focused on new venture development, intellectual property, and licensing at the University of Utah's College of Law. He earned a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of Michigan, a J.D. from the University of Utah College of Law, and a B.A. in Chemistry from Florida State University.
Catherine Ball, Ph.D. has served as Chief Scientific Officer for AncestryDNA, LLC since September 2016. She joined Ancestry in 2011 as Vice President of Genomics and Bioinformatics, helping to establish the Company’s approach to genetic genealogy leading to the launch of AncestryDNA. Cathy is a genomic scientist who has annotated and mined the genomes of various organisms and created resources to help clinicians, citizens and other scientists exploit and explore genome data. Her career has focused on helping people around the world appreciate, understand and use their own genomic data. Cathy has collaborated on the annotation of the first sequenced eukaryotic genome (brewer's yeast) and has collaboratively built databases to explore the genomes of yeast, E. coli and the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. As a pioneer in data analysis resources for high-throughput biomedical technologies, she led the Stanford Microarray Database, the largest academic database of its kind. Cathy has used high-throughput biomedical data to shed light on diverse research topics, from the biology of infectious organisms to the mechanisms involved in cell division and cancer. She has presented seminars at leading universities and contributes to National Institutes of Health committees. She received a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Cathy was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley prior to her research in the Departments of Genetics and Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Brian Hansen has served as our Vice President and General Manager of Emerging Businesses since March 2015 and has held several product and general management roles at Ancestry for more than a decade. Brian is responsible for Newspapers.com, Fold3, AncestryProGenealogists, the Ancestry Institutional products in libraries and classrooms, Archives.com, and Ancestry Academy. Brian's previous startup roles since 1997 include COO at iArchives (acquired by Ancestry.com), VP of Product at Kaboodle (acquired by Hearst Interactive), COO at Infopia, VP of Product and Business Development at FlipDog (acquired by Monster), and Strategic Projects Manager at Onyx Software. Brian holds an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and a B.A. from Brigham Young University.
Sriram joined Ancestry in September 2017 as Senior Vice President & Chief Information officer to lead global information technology strategy, solutions and operations. Sriram brings 20 years of leadership experience as a technology executive building and managing highly scalable infrastructure platforms, enterprise application architectures and corporate information security at leading technology organizations. Before joining Ancestry, Sriram served as SVP & Chief Information Officer at Infoblox where he was responsible for information security, network operations, infrastructure management, enterprise applications and business intelligence solutions. Prior to Infoblox, Sriram was the Head of Global IT organization at Twitter where he was responsible for leading the development and scaling of corporate IT infrastructure, enterprise applications, corporate productivity engineering solutions to support the company’s rapid growth. Before Twitter, Sriram served as Vice President of IT & Premium services infrastructure, overseeing a global team of software engineers, IT professionals and infrastructure engineers that built highly scalable IT solutions and consumer payments infrastructure platform. Earlier in his career, Sriram has also held leadership positions at VeriSign and Ernst & Young. Sriram holds a Masters in Electrical Engineering from Florida Atlantic University and Bachelors in Electronics and Communication engineering from Anna University, India.
Niraj Nagrani has served as our Senior Vice President and General Manager of Products and Platform since August 2017. In this role, he leads the strategic architectural design, development, and delivery of Ancestry’s digital Data, Cloud, Commerce and client-facing Web/Mobile/Social product and platform technologies. Niraj provides a superior in-depth knowledge and successful track record in strategy and delivering of products and platforms at scale, building high-performing teams, harnessing data insights to solve customer problems and inspiring others to reach their potential.
Niraj joined Ancestry from American Express, where most recently he was Vice President and Enterprise Head of Digital Data and Cloud products responsible for strategy and delivery of AmEx’s internal and consumer-facing Data, ML, AI, Cloud Payments and Digital web/mobile product capabilities. He is credited with several innovations in the Data, Cloud, mobile and digital technology space. Earlier, Niraj was Vice President of Product and Technology at Andreessen Horowitz funded startup SnapLogic, where he led consumer/enterprise SaaS/PaaS product strategy and development through multiple rounds of successful series funding. Prior, Niraj held various executive positions at Microsoft Public Cloud Windows Azure and O365 over multiple years where he led global product and engineering teams at scale for SaaS/PaaS/IaaS from inception through first billion in revenue, global subscription packaging and adoption. Before Microsoft, Niraj was an early member of the founding team and Foundational Capital VC funded startup Interwoven where he successfully led product and engineering teams across multiple SaaS and Platform products, growing them from inception into an ECM category leader and eventually IPO. In addition, Niraj has also held a variety of executive Technology and Product leadership positions at Oracle and Capgemini for global IT strategy consulting.
Niraj serves on advisory committees of various early and late stage startups and has multiple publications in Science Journal and IEEE Journals. Niraj is also an active member of Asha for Education, a non-profit organization to support education for underprivileged kids worldwide. Niraj plays an active role in leading industry CXO forums and technology executive networks, including the Evanta CDO, AI, Strata, CTO and Fortune. Niraj holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management in Strategy and Finance, a M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin and a B.S. in Electronic Engineering.
Caroline Sheu serves as the Senior Vice President of U.S. Marketing at Ancestry, where she is responsible for delivering the region’s $1B+ revenue via best-in-class, full funnel marketing. Caroline brings almost 20 years of experience transforming marketing organizations to adapt to rapidly changing consumer and technology trends. Prior to Ancestry, Caroline was the Vice President of Global Digital and Customer Marketing at GAP Inc., where she led the central marketing organization driving digital and mobile first transformation across the company’s five omnichannel brands (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Athleta, and Intermix). Prior to Gap, Caroline was the CMO at Care.com, the leading online marketplace for care services, where she achieved over 25% YoY revenue growth through marketing and product innovation – including new mobile products, new pricing and packaging, and new distribution channels. Before Care.com, Caroline spent 10 years in digital gaming and entertainment, heading marketing at Disney Interactive, Sony Network Entertainment, and EA Online. During this time, Caroline launched seven No. 1 iPhone gaming apps, the innovative toys-to-life action video game “Disney Infinity,” which was nominated for the 2014 Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards, a global music streaming service, two video on demand services, and several leading online gaming services.
Caroline holds a B.A. in Political Science and in East Asian Studies from UCLA, an M.A. in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley, and a J.D./M.B.A. from University of Chicago.