Scott Kauffman

Scott L. Kauffman is the Chairman and CEO of MDC Partners, the progressive marketing and communications network that champions innovative entrepreneurial talent. After a celebrated career in media and publishing, and a successful track record of creating growth in Silicon Valley, Kauffman joined the MDC Partners Board of Directors in 2006 to fuel the company’s momentum and growth. In 2015, he was named Chairman and CEO of MDC Partners, where he now oversees a portfolio of world’s most innovative and celebrated creative and media services businesses.

As early as 1992, Ad Age named him one of the top 100 marketers in the country, and in 1996, named him one of 20 “Digital Media Masters.” Recently, Kauffman was recognized among the WSJ’s “Advertising Industry Executives to Watch” in 2016 and 2017, and he was named among Adweek’s 2017 “Power Players.”

Amassing a unique background as a media, tech and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Kauffman has helped foster a culture of invention and collaboration at MDC Partners, while driving global expansion. Prior to joining the MDC Partners Board, he served as Co-Founder, President & CEO of New Engineering University, an education services company. Before that, he was President & CEO of Geeknet (NASDAQ:GKNT), the parent company of SourceForge, Slashdot and ThinkGeek, which he joined shortly after Yahoo! acquired BlueLithium where he served as President & COO.

Kauffman has also served as President & CEO of several early-stage Internet ventures, including Zinio, MusicNow, Coremetrics and eCoverage. In 1997, Kleiner Perkins recruited him to Silicon Valley to become President & CEO of AdKnowledge, which he filed to take public before negotiating its sale to CMGI in 1999.

Kauffman was previously Vice President & General Manager of online services for CompuServe, and a presenting member on the road show for one of the Internet industry’s first successful IPOs, led by Goldman Sachs. Kauffman also spent seven years at Time Warner as a member of the founding team of Entertainment Weekly magazine, and then as VP Business Development for Time Warner Interactive, following five years at Newsweek as a publisher and GM of Newsweek’s Education Division.

Kauffman holds an A.B. in English from Vassar College and an MBA in marketing from New York University.