Jeremy Stoppelman
Jeremy Stoppelman
Jeremy Stoppelmanis an American business executive. He is the CEO of Yelp, Inc., which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois in 1999. After a short time working for @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the VP of Engineering after the company was renamed PayPal. Stoppelman left PayPal to attend Harvard Business School. During a summer internship at MRL Ventures, he and others came up with the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
CountryUnited States of America
I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn't pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn't last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times I screwed up the computer.
As a kid, I harbored this fantasy of starting a company. I looked at the entrepreneur column in Forbes. I looked at it every month and thought, 'I want to be that guy.'
I think by paying attention to the feedback that you get on Yelp, you can very quickly integrate it into your business... The really savvy folks out there, they don't necessarily take anything negative personally, but use it as constructive feedback and adjust their business.
There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.
Focusing on that one review you feel is unfair misses the value, which is the whole symphony of opinions you get on your page.
I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.
Yelp has been in this business since it really became something worth thinking about in 2004, when the transition started happening from the world of the Yellow Pages to the world of searching online for local information.
The entrepreneurs that really make it are the ones that start with an idea but are ready to change it at a moment's notice.
Everyone is panicked about the transition to mobile. I don't lose any sleep whatsoever.
Maintaining the trust of the consumer is critical to our business
Yelp is in a very nice spot: local data, and especially review data, is one of the killer apps on mobile phones.
There is this cat and mouse game that plays out over time where our team comes up with new and interesting ideas to identify content that we shouldn't recommend, and over time people are constantly probing that, trying to figure out how can they get around that and get a better reputation on Yelp.
I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there's a financial incentive.
Choose something you are passionate about - or a pain point that has affected you and that you feel really needs to be changed.