Jeffrey A. Citron

Jeffrey A. Citron (born September 5, 1970) is chairman of the board and former CEO of Vonage, a VOIP phone company. He was previously affiliated with Datek Online, an online stock brokerage.

Early life Citron was raised in Staten Island, the son of Howard Citron.

Career Citron started working at Datek Securities as an office clerk in 1988, when he was 17 and had just graduated from high school. With programmer Joshua Levine, he found ways to automate securities trading and exploit weaknesses in the Nasdaq Small Order Execution System, and founded several companies associated with Datek including Smith Wall Associates and, in 1992, The Island ECN, an electronic stock exchange that was bought by Instinet in 2002. From 1998 to 1999, when he left both companies, he was chairman and CEO of Datek, which was acquired by TD Ameritrade in 2002; Citron got $500 million for his stake.

In 2000 he was invited to join Min-X, an electronic exchange for trading phone minutes, and provided much of the funding for relaunching it as the VOIP company Vonage. Citron was also managing partner of KEC Holdings, and in 2008 he opened a fish restaurant in Manhattan, Fishtail, with David Burke.

Citron resigned from Datek amid an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into possible securities fraud, and in 2003 was a defendant in a civil enforcement action by the SEC against day-trader Heartland Securities Corp. In the resulting settlement, in which he did not admit guilt, When the settlement was finalized in February 2003, the SEC also ordered Citron be "barred from association with any broker or dealer", which necessitated his stepping down as CEO of Vonage when the company went public in 2006. it makes donations in the fields of medicine, the arts, education, and advocacy for children.