About Circle of Moms

Company

A Unique Mission

Circle of Moms aims to help moms connect with each other to address the challenges and share the joys of motherhood together. The commitment to fostering an educational, supportive and secure environment has made Circle of Moms the largest and fastest-growing community of its kind.

Overview

Circle of Moms is the largest and fastest-growing online community for moms, connecting over 6 million moms worldwide to share advice and support essential to the journey of motherhood. More than 13% of moms in the US are members, and we attract 100,000 new moms every week.

Our moms are actively engaged with the site. They post over 5000 questions and replies daily and nearly 2 million visit us monthly. Moms use their trusted friendship circles and thousands of vibrant communities to connect with moms they already know and moms with common interests they meet here. Moms ask questions and get useful recommendations, discuss their latest topic of interest with other moms who share their passions, and find empathy and encouragement in a safe environment.

Circle of Moms also enables moms to record special moments in their children's lives and share them with friends and family. 7% of children born in 2008 in the US have a profile at Circle of Moms. We believe that by helping moms help each other, we foster camaraderie, encourage learning and make motherhood an even more fun and rewarding experience.

How We Started

Back in the summer of 2007, entrepreneurs Ephraim Luft and Mike Greenfield launched Circle of Friends, a Facebook Application that allows users to keep track of their different groups of Facebook friends by creating "circles" of related friends. They soon recognized that moms were the most passionate users, and that there was a special need for moms to connect with fellow moms to help each other solve problems. Ephraim and Mike reached out to moms to learn how an online community can be a safe place to share thoughts and advice about motherhood. Guided by the real-life needs of moms, they built Circle of Moms and launched the site in October 2008.

Moms showed enthusiastic support for the cause. Over two million moms joined in its first six months, and thousands created their own communities to encourage safe and free discussion. Since then, Circle of Moms has continued to listen carefully to the voice of moms. Our incredible growth demonstrates the success of letting moms guide the design of new features and improvements to the site.

Feedback

We love hearing from our moms and other interested parties. If you'd like to share anything with us, please email us at feedback@circleofmoms.com.

You can also contact us at our physical address:

Circle of Moms
118 2nd Street, 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
USA

People

Team

Ephraim Luft

Co-Founder and CEO

Ephraim has extensive experience building emerging media businesses and technologies. Prior to co-founding Circle of Moms, Ephraim had leadership roles in product and business development at Massive Incorporated, an in-game advertising network acquired by Microsoft in 2006. Before that, Ephraim worked on the new video products marketing team at Comcast, and as a program manager at Microsoft TV. When he's not talking to moms about their online needs in coffee shops or to brands about their goals in reaching and engaging moms online, he likes to travel (although not as much as he'd like to), read and spend time with friends. Ephraim has a BS in Computer Science from Stanford and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Fun Mom Fact: Though he and his mom Martha deny it, Ephraim is a mama's boy.

Mike Greenfield

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Mike brings extensive experience in technology development and analytics to Circle of Moms. He spent his post-college years as a Senior Scientist at PayPal, where he developed much of PayPal's early fraud detection technology, which played a vital role in making PayPal profitable. Most recently, Mike led the Analytics team at LinkedIn, where he helped the service grow from a small site with a few hundred thousand users and no revenue to become both profitable and the clear leader in its space with ten million members. Mike also founded the quantitative sports site TeamRankings.com, which has a large following among sports stats geeks and has been featured everywhere from TechCrunch to Sports Illustrated. When he's not working on Circle of Moms, Mike enjoys running, cycling, hiking, and playing squash and soccer. Mike has a BS in Mathematical and Computational Science from Stanford University.

Fun Mom Fact: Mike hopes to be half the cook his mom is... one day.

Lee Cunliffe

Web Developer

Originally from San Jose but more recently from New Zealand, Lee came back to California hoping to go on a longish bike ride, but ended up falling off in San Francisco and working for Circle of Moms. Lee has degrees in fine art and philosophy and runs a New Zealand art criticism website, artbash.co.nz.

Fun Mom Fact: Lee's mom recently joined Facebook. Unknown: whether or not he has accepted her friend request...

Lisa Brand

Community Manager

Lisa is a writer and creative director with more than fifteen years of experience creating compelling products and media for women and kids. She's lead product and brand development teams at Oxygen Media, LeapFrog, and HarperCollins Children's Books, and has served as an editor at Daily Candy Kids and Apartment Therapy. A fourth-generation New Yorker, she now lives in a power-outage-prone national park (San Francisco's Presidio) with her husband and two kids. She loves to travel and has lived in Japan and aboard a container ship, but for the time being is limiting her adventures to wherever Dora the Explorer takes her. She holds a BA in literature from Yale University and studied screenwriting at Columbia University's graduate School of the Arts.

Fun Mom Fact: Lisa is grateful to her mom for handing down a love of candlelight.

Brian Leung

Senior Software Engineer

Brian specializes in back-end technologies at Circle of Moms and has an extensive background in applied machine learning, pattern recognition, computer vision, and information retrieval. After receiving his Masters, he went to work at Microsoft to build the personalization system for the Tablet PC handwriting recognizers. More recently, he architected the data mining infrastructure that processes and matches millions of records per day at Spock, the world's largest people search engine. Before joining Circle of Moms, Brian founded Kidjutsu, a comics website where kids read comics online for free. When not ab/unit-testing at Circle of Moms, he spends time with his wife, Julia and their beautiful baby girl. Brian double-majored in EECS and Mathematics at MIT.

Fun Mom Fact: Brian is the first dad at Circle of Moms.

Louise Magno

Software Developer

Louise is a software developer who hails from the Philippines. She has worked at a few start-ups as a software engineer before joining Circle of Moms. She loves coding, having fun with her son at the park and playing video games. She holds a BS in Computer Science from University of the Philippines.

Fun Mom Fact: Louise named her son after KoRn's lead singer Jonathan Davis.

Chris Gilmore

Cloud Engineer

Chris Gilmore is half man, half cloud. Minimalist to the core. Maker of tools, each of which does one thing and does it well. Maintainer of a small army of elastic resources. Ambition to become the first cyborg into outer space. Chris holds a BS in computer science from the University of Florida.

Fun Mom Fact: All great men have supportive mothers.

Skye Lee

Advisor

Skye brings more than fourteen years of high tech industry experience to Circle of Moms. She is a user experience specialist, strategist and internet entrepreneur. Skye has worked for Netscape, Adobe, PayPal, eBay and various other Silicon Valley start-ups. Skye enjoys spending time with her boys (husband and son) and working (in that order). Skye majored in Design at Carnegie Mellon University.

Fun Mom Fact: Skye is the mom of Kai, 2 years old. Yes, the rhyme was intentional.

Douglas Hineline

User Interface Developer

Douglas specializes in developing engaging front end technologies that excite users and inspire brand loyalty. Originally from Indianapolis, Douglas started as a digital designer for Gannet, and built award winning cross-publishing and social network applications for the Indianapolis Star and other national Gannet papers. He later moved to the Bay Area and took a job with Vivaty, an innovative 3d social network before joining Circle of Moms. Douglas holds a degree in Philosophy and Religion from Florida State University and is an avid gamer and martial artist.

Fun Mom Fact: A pacifist by nature, the only way to get Douglas really upset is to insult his mother.

 

Investors

Venture Capital Firms

Maples Investments

SoftTech VC

HitForge

Press

For update information on Circle of Moms and to view featured mom profiles, visit the Circle of Moms Blog

Jobs

Why Work at Circle of Moms?

As an employee of Circle of Moms, you can be an important part of building a vibrant community that improves lives of millions of mothers. We are the fastest-growing and largest community for mothers on the Internet. Nearly 2 million moms visit our site every month to connect with other moms to address the challenges and share the joys of motherhood together. We launched the site less than a year ago, and are already profitable.

Circle of Moms employees enjoy the best of both worlds: they have prominent roles on a small, fast-moving team and affect millions of people at the same time through their work on an established product used and loved by mothers worldwide.

Our benefits package meets or exceeds comparable programs at other small companies, and significant equity stakes are still available for some positions. Circle of Moms was founded by two Stanford alumni who were early employees at PayPal, LinkedIn, and Massive. Circle of Moms is funded by leading Silicon Valley investors including Mike Maples and Jeff Clavier.

We are located in the SOMA/ South Beach neighborhood of San Francisco with easy access to the Caltrain, muni, and BART.

We welcome all interested applicants to check out our job listings here or to apply now by sending your resume to jobs@circleofmoms.com. We look forward to reading your application.