Our Board of Directors

Alexa von Tobel

Alexa von Tobel is the founder and CEO of LearnVest.com, the award-winning financial planning company. Alexa developed the idea for LearnVest during her senior year at Harvard College, when she realized she, and most of her peers, had never had any formal education on how to effectively manage their finances. Alexa searched for reliable financial guidance and consistently came up overwhelmed or disappointed. Thus, the LearnVest mission was born – to make trusted personal financial information accessible to millions across the country.

Originally from Florida, Alexa received an A.B. in Psychology at Harvard College. Upon graduation, she worked as a trader at Morgan Stanley on their Proprietary Trading Desk before leaving to be the Head of Business Development at Drop.io, a venture backed start-up in NYC. She enrolled in Harvard Business School in the fall of 2008 only to take a leave of absence shortly after to launch LearnVest and pursue her dream of bringing financial literacy to millions of people everywhere.

Since launching LearnVest, Alexa has been widely quoted as a personal finance expert and entrepreneur in top tier business and consumer publications including: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, InStyle, TechCrunch, and many more. In addition, Alexa has appeared on several local and national television shows including The Today Show, Good Morning America, and Anderson, among many others.

She was recently selected as a 2012 Fortune Most Powerful Women Entrepreneur, named “One of the Coolest Young Entrepreneurs” in Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 feature, titled a “Woman to Watch” by Forbes, listed as one of “18 Women Changing the World” in Marie Claire, and selected as a 2011 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Theresia Gouw

Theresia has been with Accel Partners since 1999. She focuses primarily on internet and software investments with specific interest in Vertical Search/Media, online media, advertising and security. Theresia has worked in the computer and communications industries since the late-1980’s as an entrepreneur, consultant and venture investor.

Prior to joining Accel Partners, she was founding Vice President of Business Development & Sales at Release Software, a venture-backed company which developed products to enable digital rights management and payment technologies for the software industry. Before that, Theresia worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company and a product manager at Silicon Graphics.

Theresia serves as a Trustee on Brown University’s Corporation Board, on the board of DonorsChoose.org and as a member of Stanford’s DAPER Investment Fund. Theresia holds an Sc.B. in Engineering from Brown University, magna cum laude and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.

Ann F. Kaplan

Ann Kaplan is the Chair of the Board of LearnVest.

Ms. Kaplan’s professional activities focus on financial organization and empowerment for women. She is the Chair of Circle Financial Group, an investment and wealth management membership organization. She also teaches a course on wealth management at the Columbia University School of Business. She is a founder of the Center for Women’s Financial Independence at Smith College and conducts financial fitness classes for women in New York City.

Ms. Kaplan was previously a general partner of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and a managing director after the firm became a public company. She was a member of the Fixed Income Division for 23 years and served as the head of the municipal bond department. During her last three years at the firm, she was a member of the Asset Management Division focusing on wealth management.for women.

Ms. Kaplan serves as a board member of the Goldman Sachs Bank USA. She is a trustee of Columbia University, the American Red Cross, Smith College, the Museum of Arts & Design, the Economic Club of New York and the New York Chapter of the Women’s Forum. She is a member of the Board of Overseers of the Columbia University School of Business and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Ms. Kaplan holds a B.A. in government from Smith College and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.

Lee Barba

Lee is the former Chairman and CEO of thinkorswim Group Inc., a market leader in providing integrated investor education and online brokerage services to the self-directed investor, which was acquired by TD Ameritrade for $606 million in 2009. Mr. Barba was appointed Chief Executive Officer and Director of the Company in December 2001 and Chairman in June 2002.

Before thinkorswim Group Inc., he served as Chief Executive Officer of Telescan, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company (“Telescan”). Prior to joining Telescan in February of 2000, he was the Chief Executive Officer of Open Link Financial, a risk management software company whose largest shareholder, Coral Energy, was a wholly owned subsidiary of Shell Oil Company. Mr. Barba joined Open Link after serving as President of Coral Energy. Mr. Barba joined Coral Energy after 22 years on Wall Street, where he was responsible for managing global trading businesses for Bankers Trust Company.

He earned his M.B.A. from Columbia University and his B.A. from the University of North Carolina.

Formal Advisors

Janet Riccio

Janet is an Executive Vice President at Omnicom Group, Inc. and the CEO and Founder of G23. Over the course of Janet’s 25+ years in advertising, her collaborative business style has taken her to more than 30 countries on five continents on behalf of her clients and forged a deep appreciation of how relationships with consumers build brands all over the world.

Catherine Levene

Catherine is the former COO/CEO of DailyCandy.com. Ms. Levene joined DailyCandy with more than a decade of experience creating and growing online media properties. Prior to Daily Candy, she served as Senior Vice President of Product and Business Development with TheFind.com, a leading Internet shopping search site. Prior to that, Ms. Levene spent more than seven years at New York Times Digital as Vice President of Product, Business Development and Strategy, building The Times’ digital Internet properties, including NYTimes.com. Ms. Levene serves as Member of Advisory Board of Glam Media Inc.

Greg Waldorf

Greg spent more than 11 years working with eHarmony where he became the company’s founding investor in 2000. Through the early years of the company’s growth, he was a very active advisor and board member working closely with the company’s founders, culminating in his appointment as CEO in 2006. During the last five years, Waldorf drove a global expansion of the company into new markets both domestically and in 15 countries worldwide.

Greg Coleman

Greg Coleman joined The Huffington Post in October 2009 as the company’s president and chief revenue officer. Coleman, who has more than 25 years of sales and media experience, is responsible for rapidly building upon the platform The Huffington Post has created and works with the team to grow revenue and deepen the brand’s engagement with marketers.