Steve Kaufer is a bully, who will pick on individuals until they reach their breaking point and walk out the door. Because he micromanages the entire business, TripAdvisor can never do two things at once. This leaves efforts that can be great successes (like Instant Book) as failures.
In the last six months, we've lost all female executive leadership outside of HR (head of marketing, head of sales) as well as the male head of product. Steve has told us that he's going to hire two replacement presidents for this bloodbath at the leadership ranks. However, its been eight months and no hire has been made.
The lack of ability to hire either these presidents over six months speaks to the fact that Steve spends his time filing bugs, calling out individual sales reps, engineers and marketers, and not executing on critical CEO tasks like strategy, hiring, culture, organization. Or potentially - just that the word on the executive street is that you should never work for Steve Kaufer.
TripAdvisor may promise you a nice stock based signing bonus - but you'll never realize it while Steve is the CEO.