Ellis Krienik

Ellis Krienik is a Chicago-based investment professional with over a decade of experience in private equity and mergers & acquisitions. He is currently a Director at Fifth Star, Inc., the holding company founded and led by serial entrepreneur Sam Yagan (co-founder of SparkNotes, eDonkey, and OkCupid, and former CEO of Match Group and ShopRunner). Fifth Star operates as a permanent-capital vehicle that acquires and builds consumer and consumer-adjacent technology companies.

Prior to Fifth Star, Krienik spent several years as a Vice President at Wind Point Partners, a Chicago middle-market private equity firm with more than $6 billion in assets under management that focuses on control buyouts of manufacturing, business services, and consumer companies. (Wind Point closed its eighth fund at $985M in 2017.) He is no longer listed on the Wind Point team roster, consistent with his move to Fifth Star.

Krienik began his career in investment banking at Lazard, giving him an M&A and capital-markets foundation before moving to the buy side. He holds a B.S.B.A. in Finance from The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business. His stated skill set spans private equity, venture capital, corporate strategy, and financial modeling.

• Operates within the consumer / consumer-adjacent technology space through Fifth Star, which acquires and grows businesses rather than taking minority venture positions in the traditional sense.
• Comes from a control-oriented private equity background (Wind Point Partners middle-market buyouts), so his lens skews toward durable business models, unit economics, and operational value creation rather than pure early-stage moonshots.
• Fifth Star's founder Sam Yagan separately runs Corazon Capital, a Chicago Seed/Series A venture firm investing in consumer tech, marketplaces, fintech, AI, and travel — the likely origin of the "Seed Round" framing attached to this profile.
• No public, self-authored investment thesis from Krienik himself was found; the above is inferred from his firms' stated strategies and should be verified directly.