Stephen Kaufer (born September 7, 1962[2]) is an American businessman who founded travel services company TripAdvisor.

[3] Kaufer launched TripAdvisor in 2000 with Langley Steinert, and was the company's president and chief executive officer from then until his retirement in 2022.

[3] As a trial lawyer, Steve's father had always impressed on him the value of "articulate persuasion" and regularly engaged his eldest child in rigorous, dinner-table debate.

[3] At the outset of his college years at Harvard, Steve thought he would major in physics, but, he recalls, "I liked the pulleys-and-levers part, but not the extensive math."

[3] That same year, when he and his wife were planning a vacation in Mexico, he discovered, with frustration, how difficult it was to find online any unbiased information and candid opinions about specific hotels.

[3][9] When he finally launched such a site, a few years later, his initial plan flopped because he was trying a business-to-business approach, partnering with other travel-related websites, instead of engaging directly with travelers.

But, eventually, he landed on a winning formula: make TripAdvisor available to everyone (not business to business), aggregate tons of information about hotels and attractions, encourage travelers to provide personal reviews, and structure contracts so that his company would earn a fee from travel companies every time a TripAdivsor user clicked to their sites (whether or not it ended in a sale).

[TripAdvisor] was born of an average traveler’s desire to plan a great trip for a precious week or two of vacation time.