We’re all very excited around Howcast lately. (More than usual, that is). That’s because Alex Ellerson has just joined the team as Senior Vice President, Business Development and Legal Affairs. Alex will be (in fact, already is) spearheading our growing roster of business relationships, as well as making sure all our legal ducks are in order. These are are two things that Alex is extraordinarily good at. I’m not just saying that: I’ve seen it first hand.

Alex and I worked closely at Google, where Alex was Head of Entertainment and Premium Content Partnerships for YouTube - and we spent large swaths of time negotiating and closing complex deals with a host of major media companies. Believe me, you want a rock-star BD guy like Alex in the trenches with you. It also doesn’t hurt that Alex is a whip-smart lawyer, having worked at one of New York’s top firms, Cravath, Swaine & Moore. He also edited the Law Review while at Columbia Law School.

Prior to working at Google, Alex spent 6 years at Yahoo working in a variety of roles, including head of BD for Yahoo Search and GM of Yahoo Health and Yahoo Astrology. Prior to Yahoo, Alex was General Counsel and COO of The CMJ Network (formally College Media), where he managed operations and a team of 80 people.

Fact: Alex is a huge Yankees fan and is eternally thankful that the Mohegan Tribe of Connecticut is in the casino business.

-Daniel Blackman

While he’s been with us for a couple of weeks, we’d like to officially welcome Jeffrey Kaufman to our team at Howcast.

Welcome Aboard Jeffrey!

As Vice President of of Programming and Content Development, Jeffrey will ensure Howcast produces and shows the best, most helpful how-to content on the Internet.

Coming to us from MTV by way of NBCU, Jeffrey has the perfect background for this role:

He spent 12 years in programming, research and strategic development at MTV, aligning brand and business goals while spotting cultural trends in support of a broad set of initiatives, including the launch of MTV.COM, MTV Overdrive (MTV’s broadband channel), the MTV Games imprint, and Urge (MTVN’s digital music download service).

In 2006, Jeffrey went to NBCU, where he led content acquisition and all editorial programming strategy for the launch of digital startup nbbc; he also helped launch Hulu.

Fact: Jeffrey does stand-up comedy in his spare time. He’s also a rather serious collector comic books. (He has an entire mini-storage room to stockpile his vast collection.)

The Howcast Team