You want experimentation. Every once in awhile, you stumble upon something that blows your mind.
— Jeremy Stoppelman
About every year or two, there is a moment of truth where there's some new development in the marketplace, some new technology, some sort of existential crisis. You just have to be vigilant about looking out for those moments.
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.
The biggest thing is to create a product that consumers find useful. As more and more people like something, it becomes harder and harder to have a conspiracy theory about it.
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.
Where folks like Google have fallen down is in just putting a little review box up, then closing their eyes and letting the algorithm take care of itself. Yelp is a technology company, but also a company that understands how people want to connect with one another.
Yelp is in a very nice spot: local data, and especially review data, is one of the killer apps on mobile phones.
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 don't feel necessarily it's winner-take-all across the globe, where there has to be one local guide for the entire world. We'll certainly do as many of these markets as we can.
Focusing on that one review you feel is unfair misses the value, which is the whole symphony of opinions you get on your page.
Choose something you are passionate about - or a pain point that has affected you and that you feel really needs to be changed.
In the very beginning, Yelp started as a service where we really didn't think people would write reviews for fun. The whole concept of user-generated content was pretty nascent in 2004.
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.
When Yelp first took off, our rankings on Google would fluctuate wildly.
One of the challenges of buying local advertising is, how do you know if it worked? How do you know if it's got value? We're moving toward an e-commerce experience for local, an Amazon-like experience for local.
Consumers are empowered by Yelp and tools like it: before, when they had a bad experience, they didn't have much recourse. They could fume, but often nothing else other than tell their friends.
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 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.
If somebody writes a review of a dry cleaner, that piece of content is not wildly viral. It's not like a viral video that can spread across the world in a matter of minutes, so as a result, each market is almost an island unto itself.
There's simply anger over the accountability that Yelp brings and also this feeling of powerlessness because so much power is now being put in the hands of the consumer. But the important thing that gets lost with some of these business owners who are very upset with us is it's the whole picture that counts.
In early 2008, it was confirmed that there would be an opportunity to build applications for the iPhone. We were fortunate enough to make the right call on that: to bet early, to put resources into it and have a pretty good application in the store at the moment when it opened.
Starting a company, your success is going to be very dependent on how you adapt. You're going to make decisions, you're going to make bets; most of them are going to turn out to be wrong.
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.
When you read reviews on Yelp, you get a good sense of what's going to happen when you walk in the door of that business. The challenge is that there are fifteen million businesses in the U.S., and its very hard to communicate with all of them about how Yelp works, and why it works the way it does.
A lot of what Groupon is generating is demand for something people didn't know they wanted.
On mobile, what are the core apps? It's basically messaging, mapping and review data.
Maintaining the trust of the consumer is critical to our business. We live and breathe only one thing, which is wanting to connect consumers with great local businesses, and I don't feel we can do that if we don't have effective ways to prevent gaming of the system.
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.
There are so many businesses that are succeeding on Yelp that don't pay us a dollar, and we're really excited about that.
