Author Archives: Elie Seidman

About Elie Seidman

I'm a serial entrepreneur. I live in Manhattan and am the Co-Founder and CEO of Oyster Hotel Reviews (www.oyster.com) . Ariel Charytan is my longtime business partner and a Co-Founder of Oyster. During 2006 and 2007, I was a venture partner at Lime Rock Partners, a private equity firm based in Westport, CT with $3.5 billion under management. From 2000 to 2006, I was the Co-Founder, President and CEO of Epana; Ariel was the Co-Founder and COO. We grew Epana to more than 400 employees and $200M/yr in revenue. Epana is a fully vertically integrated branded consumer goods company manufacturing, marketing, selling and distributing telephony and money remittance products. While I've spent the vast majority of my career as an entrepreneur working on the companies Ariel and I have founded, I also briefly worked at Microsoft and Trilogy (Austin, TX). I went to the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1997 with a BSE in Materials Science Engineering.

4 life lesson from Dutch (my dog)

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Elie Seidman

I did not grow up with dogs – my Mom was a cat person and we had a succession of very cute cats, all of them with vaguely French sounding names. Names like Mitzi and Shatuna. My Mom is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Startups | 1 Comment

Built for 30 years or built for 3? What is success?

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Elie Seidman

Fred Wilson’s always interesting blog and community of commenter recently got me thinking when Fred posted about sustainability. Commenters had a variety of very interesting things to say about the topic with several focusing on the issue of incentives. Sadly, … Continue reading →

Posted in Startups | Comments Off

It’s not closed until the check clears the bank

Posted on April 16, 2011 by Elie Seidman

If you’re an entrepreneur focused on building a high-growth scalable startup it’s very likely that at some point you’ll want to raise institutional capital in the form of VC or private equity (PE) money. Many others have written about how to prepare … Continue reading →

Posted in Startups | 2 Comments

Oyster’s experience with SEO

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Elie Seidman

The issue of Google’s ranking of results on travel and hotel related queries – and all queries more generally – has popped to the surface a few times over the past several weeks. Chris Dixon wrote a thoughtful piece about it most … Continue reading →

Posted in Startups | Comments Off

The hot new startup of the day

Posted on November 4, 2010 by Elie Seidman

Fred Wilson had a great post about an issue that I think most entrepreneurs have to deal with: how to process all of the information that is flowing past us about other startups. Here’s the comment I wrote in response: … Continue reading →

Posted in Startups | Comments Off

Oyster on ABC’s Nightline

Posted on October 9, 2010 by Elie Seidman

See the video of Oyster on ABC’s Nightline

Posted in Startups | 1 Comment

Oyster.com in French – Oyster.com en Francais

Posted on October 6, 2010 by Elie Seidman

We live in a global world – particularly when it comes to hotels and travel. To that end, we’ve just launched Oyster.com en Francais. Stay tuned for Oyster.com in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and German – all coming soon.

Posted in Startups | 2 Comments

QOTD – Ariel Charytan

Posted on June 26, 2010 by Elie Seidman

“Vision is not seeing the future, it’s creating it”

Posted in Startups | Comments Off

Small new feature on Oyster

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Elie Seidman

We just added a small new feature to Oyster.com. You can now search for a point of interest – say the Empire State Building – and we will show you hotels that are near it. http://www.oyster.com/about/points-of-interest/

Posted in Startups | Comments Off

The American economy was wrecked by pirates

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Elie Seidman

Investments in innovation do not pay out in the current quarter. Typically, they don’t even pay out in the current year. If you care about your bonus this year, you are directly incented not to make investments in new inventions … Continue reading →

Posted in Startups | Comments Off