Podcast appearances and mentions of jeremy stoppelman

Bob Goodson was the first employee at Yelp, founder of social media analytics company Quid, co-inventor of the Like button, and co-author of the new book Like: The Button That Changed the World. On Oct 1, 2025, Bob spent a day with our MBA students at the University of Kansas, and he shared so much great content that I asked him if we could put together some of the highlights as a podcast, which I've now put together in three chapters: First is Careers, second is Building Companies, and third is AI and Social Media. As a reminder, any views and perspectives expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individual, and not those of the organizations they represent. Hope you enjoy the episode. - [Transcript] Nate:  My name is Nate Meikle. You're listening to Meikles and Dimes, where every episode is dedicated to the simple, practical, and under-appreciated. Bob Goodson was the first employee at Yelp, founder of social media analytics company Quid, co-inventor of the like button, and co-author of the new book Like: The Button That Changed the World. On Oct 1, 2025, Bob spent a day with our MBA students at the University of Kansas, and he shared so much great content that I asked him if we could put together some of the highlights as a podcast, which I've now put together in three chapters: First is Careers, second is Building Companies, and third is AI and Social Media. As a reminder, any views and perspectives expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individual and not those of the organizations they represent. Hope you enjoy the episode. Let's jump into Chapter 1 on Careers. For the first question, a student asked Bob who he has become and how his experiences have shaped him as a person and leader.   Bob:  Oh, thanks, Darrell. That's a thoughtful question. It's thoughtful because it's often not asked, and it's generally not discussed. But I will say, and hopefully you'll feel like this about your work if you don't already, that you will over time, which is I'm 45 now, so I have some sort of vantage point to look back over. Like, I mean, I started working when I was about 9 or 10 years old, so I have been working for money for about 35 years. So I'm like a bit further into my career than perhaps I look. I've been starting companies and things since I was about 10. So, in terms of like my professional career, which I guess started, you know, just over 20 years ago, 20 years into that kind of work, the thing I'm most grateful for is what it's allowed me to learn and how it's evolved me as a person. And I'm also most grateful on the business front for how the businesses that I've helped create and the projects and client deployments and whatever have helped evolve the people that have worked on them. Like I genuinely feel that is the most lasting thing that anything in business does is evolve people. It's so gratifying when you have a team member that joins and three years later you see them, just their confidence has developed or their personality has developed in some way. And it's the test of the work that has evolved them as people. I mean, I actually just on Monday night, I caught up for the first time in 10 years with an intern we had 10 years ago called Max Hofer. You can look him up. He was an intern at Quid. He was from Europe, was studying in London, came to do an internship with us in San Francisco for the summer. And, he was probably like 18, 19 years old. And a few weeks ago, he launched his AI company, Parsewise, with funding from Y Combinator. And, he cites his experience at Quid as being fundamental in choosing his career path, in choosing what field he worked in and so on. So that was, yeah, that was, when you see these things happening, right, 10 years on, we caught up at an event we did in London on Monday. And it's just it's really rewarding. So I suppose, yeah, like I suppose it's it's brought me a lot of perspective, brought me a lot of inner peace, actually, you know, the and and when you're when I was in the thick of it at times, I had no sense of that whatsoever. Right. Like in tough years. And there were some - there have been some very tough years in my working career that you don't feel like it's developing you in any way. It just feels brutal. I liken starting a company, sometimes it's like someone's put you in a room with a massive monster and the monster pins you down and just bats you across the face, right, for like a while. And you're like just trying to get away from the monster and you're like, finally you get the monster off your back and then like the monster's just on you again. And it just, it's just like you get a little bit of space and freedom and then the monster's back and it's just like pummeling you. And it's just honestly some years, like for those of you, some of you are running companies now, right? And starting your own companies as well. And I suppose it's not just starting companies. There are just phases in your career and work where it's like you look back and you're like, man, that year was just like, that was brutal. You just get up and fight every day, and you just get knocked down every day. So I think, I don't wish that on anybody, but it does build resilience that then transfers into other aspects of your life.    Nate:  Next, a student made a reference to the first podcast episode I recorded with Bob and asked him if he felt like he was still working on the most important problem in his field.    Bob:  Yeah, thank you. Thanks for listening to the podcast, as this gives us… thanks for the chance to plug the podcast. So the way I met Nate is that he interviewed me for his podcast. And for those of you who haven't listened to it, it's a 30 minute interview. And he asked this question about what advice would you share with others? And we honed in on this question of like, what is the most important problem in your field? And are you working on it? Which I love as a guide to like choosing what to work on. And so we had a great conversation. I enjoyed it so much and really enjoyed meeting Nate. So we sort of said, hey, let's do more fun stuff together in the future. So that's what brought us to this conversation. And thanks to Nate for, you know, bringing us all together today. I'm always working on what I think is the most important problem in front of me. And I always will be. I can't help it. I don't have to think about it. I just can't think about anything else. So yes, I do feel like right now I'm working on the most important problem in my field. And I feel like I've been doing that for about 20 years. And it's not for everybody, I suppose. But I just think, like, let's talk about that idea a little bit. And then I'll say what I think is the most important problem in my field that I'm working on. Like, just to translate it for each of you. Systems are always evolving. The systems we live in are evolving. We all know that. People talk about the pace of change and like life's changing, technology's changing and so on. Well, it is, right? Like humans developed agriculture 5,000 years ago. That wasn't very long ago. Agriculture, right? Just the idea that you could grow crops in one area and live in that area without walking around, without moving around settlements and different living in different places. And that concept is only 5,000 years old, right? I mean, people debate exactly how old, like 7, 8,000. But anyway, it's not that long ago, considering Homo sapiens have been walking around for in one form or another for several hundred thousand years and humans in general for a couple million years. So 5,000 years is not long. Look at what's happened in 5,000 years, right? Like houses, the first settlements where you would actually just live at sleep in the same place every night is only 5,000 years old. And now we've got on a - you can access all the world's knowledge - on your phone for free through ChatGPT and ask it sophisticated questions and all right answers. Or you can get on a plane and fly all over the world. You have, you know, sophisticated digital currency systems. We have sophisticated laws. And like, we've got to be aware, I think, that we are living in a time of great change. And that has been true for 5,000 years, right? That's not new. So I think about this concept of the forefront. I imagine, human development is, you can just simply imagine it like a sphere or balloon that someone's like blowing up, right? And so every time they breathe into it, like something shifts and it just gets bigger. And so there's stuff happening on the forefront where it's occupying more space, different space, right? There's stuff in the middle that's like a bit more stable and a bit more, less prone to rapid change, right? The education system, some parts of the healthcare system, like certain professions, certain things that are like a bit more stable, but there's stuff happening all the time on the periphery, right? Like on the boundary. And that stuff is affecting every field in one way or another. And I just think if you get a chance to work on that stuff, that's a really interesting place to live and a really interesting place to work. And I feel like you can make a contribution to that, right, if you put yourself on the edge. And it's true for every field. So whatever field you're in, we had people here today, you know, in everything from, yeah, like the military to fitness to, you know, your product, product design and management and, you know, lots of different, you know, people, different backgrounds. But if you ask yourself, what is the most important thing happening in my area of work today, and then try to find some way to work on it, then I think that sort of is a nice sort of North Star and keeps things interesting. Because the sort of breakthroughs and discoveries and important contributions are actually not complicated once you put yourself in that position. They're obvious once you put yourself in that position, right? It's just that there aren't many people there hanging out in that place. If you're one of them, if you put yourself there, not everyone's there, suddenly you're kind of in a room where like lots of cool stuff can happen, but there aren't many people around to compete with you. So you're more likely to find those breakthroughs, whether it's for your company or for, you know, the people you work with or, you know, maybe it's inventions and, but it just, anyway, so I really like doing that. And in my space right now, I call it the concept of being the bridge. And this could apply to all of you too. It's a simple idea that the world's value, right, is locked up in companies, essentially. Companies create value. We can debate all the other vehicles that do it, but basically most of the world's value is tied up in companies and their processes. And that's been true for a long time. There's a new ball of power in the world, which is been created by large language models. And I think of that just like a new ball of power. So you've got a ball of value and a ball of power. And the funny thing about this new ball of power is this actually has no value. That's a funny thing to say, right? The large language models have no value. They don't. They don't have any value and they don't create value. Think about it. It's just a massive bag of words. That has no value, right? I can send you a poem now in the chat. Does that have any value? You might like it, you might not, but it's just a set of words, right? So you've got this massive bag of words that with like a trillion connections, no value whatsoever. That is different from previous tech trends like e-commerce, for example, which had inherent value because it was a new way to reach consumers. So some tech trends do have inherent value because they're new processes, but large language models don't. They're just a new technology. They're very powerful. So I call it a ball of power. but they don't have any value. So why is there a multi-trillion dollar opportunity in front of all of us right now in terms of value creation? It's being the bridge. It's how to make use of this ball of power to improve businesses. And businesses only have two ways you improve them. You save money or you grow revenue. That's it. So being the bridge, like taking this new ball of power and finding ways to save money, be more efficient, taking this new ball of power and finding ways to access new consumers, create new offerings and so on, right? Solve new problems. That is where all the value is. So while you may think that the new value, this multi-trillion dollar opportunity with AI is really for the people that work on the AI companies, sure, there's a lot of, you know, there's some money to be made there. And if you can go work for OpenAI, you probably should. Everyone should be knocking the door down. Everyone should be applying for positions because it's the most important company, you know, in our generation. But if you're not in OpenAI or Meta or Microsoft or whoever, you know, three or four companies in the US that are doing this, for everybody else, it's about being the bridge, finding ways that in your organizations, you can unlock the power of AI by bringing it into the organizations and finding ways to either save money or grow the business. And that's fascinating to me because anybody can be the bridge. You don't have to be good with large language models. You have to understand business processes and you have to be creative and willing to even think like this. And suddenly you can be on the forefront of like creating massive value at your companies because you were the, you know, you're the one that brings brings in the new tools. And I think that skill set, there are certain skills involved in being the bridge, but that skill set of being the bridge is going to be so valuable in the next 5 to 10 years. So I encourage people, and that's what I'm doing. Like, I see my role - I serve clients at Quid. I love working with clients. You know, I'm not someone that really like thrives for management and like day-to-day operations and administration of a business. I learned that about myself. And so I just spend my time serving clients. I have done for several years now. And I love just meeting clients and figuring out how they can use Quid's AI, Quid's data, and any other form of AI that we want to bring to the table to improve their businesses. And that's just what I do with my time full-time. And I'll probably be doing that for at least the next 5 or 10 years. I think the outlook for that area of work is really huge.    Nate:  Building on the podcast episode where Bob talked about working on the most important problem in his field, I asked if he could give us some more details on how he took that advice and ended up at Yelp.    Bob:  So I was in grad school in the UK studying, well, I was actually on a program for medieval literature and philosophy, but looking into like language theory. So it was not the most commercial course that one could be doing. But I was a hobbyist programmer, played around with the web when it first came up and was making, you know, various new types of websites for students. while in my free time. I didn't think of that as commercial at all. I didn't see any commercial potential in that. But I did meet the founders of PayPal that way, who would come to give a talk. And I guess they saw the potential in me as a product manager. You know, there's lots of new apps they wanted to build. This is in 2003. And so they invited me to the US to work for them. And I joined the incubator when there were just five people in it. Max Levchin was one of them, the PayPal co-founder. Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons were in those first five people. They turned out to be the Yelp co-founders. And Yelp came out of the incubator. So we were actually prototyping 4 companies each in a different industry. There was a chat application that we called Chatango that was five years before Twitter or something, but it was a way of helping people to chat online more easily. There were, which is still around today, but didn't make it as a hit. There was an ad network called AdRoll, which ended up getting renamed and is still around today. That wasn't a huge hit, but it's still around. Then there was Slide, which is photo sharing application, photo and video sharing, which was Max's company. That was acquired by Google. And that did reasonably well. I think it was acquired for about $150 million. And then there was Yelp, which you'll probably know if you're in the US and went public on the New York Stock Exchange and now has a billion dollars in revenue. So those are the four things that we were trying to prototype, each very different, as you can see. But I suppose that's the like tactical story, right? Like the steps that took me there. But there was an idea that took me there that started this journey of working on the most, the most important problems that are happening in the time. So if I rewind, when I was studying medieval literature, I got to the point where I was studying the invention of the print press. And I'd been studying manuscript culture and seeing what happened when the print press was invented and how it changed education, politics, society. You know, when you took this technology that made it cheaper to print, to make books, books were so expensive in the Middle Ages. They were the domain of only the wealthiest people. And only 5% of people could read before the print process was invented, right? So 95% of people couldn't read anything or write anything. And that was because the books themselves were just so expensive, they had to be handwritten, right? And so when the print press made the cost of a book drop dramatically, the literacy rates in Europe shot up and it completely transformed society. So I was studying that period and at the same time, like dabbling with websites in the early internet and sort of going, oh, like there was this moment where I was like, the web is our equivalent of the print press. And it's happening right now. I'm talking like maybe 2002, or so when I had this realization. It's happening right now. It's going to change everything during our lifetimes. And I just had a fork in my life where it's like I could be a professor in medieval history, which was the path I was on professionally. I had a scholarship. There were only 5 scholarships in my year, in the whole UK. I was on a scholarship track to be a professor and study things like the emergence of the print press, or I could contribute to the print press of our era, which is the internet, and find some way to contribute, some way, right? It didn't matter to me if it was big or small, it was irrelevant. It was just be in the mix with people that are pushing the boundaries. Whatever I did, I'd take the most junior role available, no problem, but like just be in the mix with the people that are doing that. So yeah, that was the decision, right? Like, and that's what led me down to sort of leave my course, leave my scholarship. And, my salary was $40,000 when I moved to the US. All right. And that's pretty much all I earned for a while. I'd spent everything I had starting a group called Oxford Entrepreneurs. So I had absolutely no money. The last few months actually living in Oxford, I had one meal a day because I didn't have enough money to buy three meals a day. And then I packed up my stuff in a suitcase - one bag - wasn't even a suitcase, it was a rucksack and moved to the US and, you know, and landed there basically on a student visa and friends and family was just thought I was, you know, not making a good decision, right? Like, I'm not earning much money. It's with a bunch of people in a like a dorm room style incubator, right? Where the tables and chairs we pulled off the street because we didn't want to spend money on tables and chairs. And where I get to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day. And I've just walked away from a scholarship and a PhD track at Oxford to go into that. And it didn't look like a good decision. But to me, the chance to work on the forefront of what's happening in our era is just too important and too interesting to not make those decisions. So I've done that a number of times, even when it's gone against commercial interest or career interest. I haven't made the best career decisions, you know, not from a commercial standpoint, but from a like getting to work on the new stuff. Like that's what I've prioritized.    Nate:  Next, I asked Bob about his first meeting with the PayPal founders and how he made an impression on them.    Bob:  Good question, because I think... So I have a high level thought on that, like a rubric to use. And then I have the details. I'll start with the details. So I had started the entrepreneurship club at Oxford. And believe it or not, in 800 years of the University's history, there was no entrepreneurship club. And they know that because when you want to start a new society, you go to university and they go through the archive, which is kept underground in the library, and someone goes down to the library archives and they go through all these pages for 800 years and look for the society that's called that. And if there is one, they pull it out and then they have the charter and you have to continue the charter. Even if it was started 300 years ago, they pull out the charter and they're like, no, you have to modify that one. You can't start with a new charter. So anyway, it's because it's technically a part of the university, right? So they have a way of administrating it. So they went through the records and were like, there's never been a club for entrepreneurs at the university. So we started the first, I was one of the co-founders of this club. And, again, there's absolutely no pay. It was just a charity as part of the university. But I love the idea of getting students who were scientists together with students that were business minded, and kind of bringing technical and creative people together. That was the theme of the club. So we'd host drinks, events and talks and all sorts. And I love building communities, at least at that stage of my life. I loved building communities. I'd been doing it. I started several charities and clubs, you know, throughout my life. So it came quite naturally to me. But what I didn't, I mean, I kind of thought this could happen, but it really changed my life as it put me at the center of this super interesting community that we've built. And I think that when you're in a university environment, like starting clubs, running clubs, even if they're small, like, we, I ran another club that we called BEAR. It was an acronym. And it was just a weekly meetup in a pub where we talked about politics and society and stuff. And like, it didn't go anywhere. It fizzled out after a year or two, but it was really like an interesting thing to work on. So I think when you're in a university environment, even if you guys are virtual, finding ways to get together, it's so powerful. It's like, it's who you're meeting in courses like this that is so powerful. So I put myself in the middle of this community, and I was running it, I was president of it. So when these people came to speak at the business school, I was asked to bring the students along, and I was given 200 slots in the lecture theatre. So I filled them, I got 200 students along. We had 3,000 members, by the way, after like 2 years running this club. It became the biggest club at the university, and the biggest entrepreneurship student community in Europe. It got written up in The Economist actually as like, because it was so popular. But yeah, it meant that I was in the middle of it. And when the business school said, you can come to the dinner with the speakers afterwards, that was my ticket to sit down next to the founder of PayPal, you know. And so, then I sat down at dinner with him, and I had my portfolio with me, which back then I used to carry around in a little folder, like a black paper folder. And every project I'd worked on, every, because I used to do graphic design for money as a student. So I had my graphic design projects. I had my yoga publishing business and projects in there. I had printouts about the websites I'd created. So when I sat down next to him, and he's like, what do you work on? I just put this thing on the table over dinner and was like, he picked it up and he started going through it. And he was like, what's this? What's this? And I think just having my projects readily available allowed him to sort of get interested in what I was working on. Nowadays, you can have a website, right? Like I didn't have a website for a long time. Now I have one. It's at bobgoodson.com where I put my projects on there. You can check it out if you like. But I think I've always had a portfolio in one way or another. And I think carrying around the stuff that you've done in an interactive way is a really good way to connect with people. But one more thing I'll say on this concept, because it connects more broadly to like life in general, is that I think that I have this theory that in your lifetime, you get around five opportunities put in front of you that you didn't yet fully deserve, right? Someone believes in you, someone opens a door, someone's like, hey, Nate, how about you do this? Or like, we think you might be capable of this. And it doesn't happen very often, but those moments do happen. And when they happen, a massive differentiator for your life is do you notice that it's happening and do you grab it with both hands? And in that moment, do everything you can to make it work, right? Like they don't come along very often. And to me, those moments have been so precious. I knew I wouldn't get many of them. And so every time they happened, I've just been all in. I don't care what's going on in my life at that time. When the door opens, I drop everything, and I do everything I can to make it work. And you're stretched in those situations. So it's not easy, right? Like someone's given you an opportunity to do something you're not ready for, essentially. So you're literally not ready for it. Like you're not good enough, you don't know enough, you don't have the knowledge, you don't have the skills. So you only have to do the job, but you have to cultivate your own skills and develop your skills. And that's a lot of work. You know, when I landed in, I mean, working for Max was one of those opportunities where I did not, I'd not done enough to earn that opportunity when I got that opportunity. I landed with five people who had all done PayPal. They were all like incredible experts in their fields, right? Like Russ Simmons, the Yelp co-founder, had been the chief architect of PayPal. He architected PayPal, right? Like I was with very skilled technical people. I was the only Brit. They were all Americans. So I stood out culturally. Most of them couldn't understand what I was saying when I arrived. I've since changed how I speak. So you can understand me, the Americans in the room. But I just mumbled. I wasn't very articulate. So it was really hard to get my ideas across. And I had programmed as a hobbyist, but I didn't know enough to be able to program production code alongside people that had worked at PayPal. I mean, their security levels and their accuracy and everything was just off the, I was in another league, right? So there I was, I felt totally out of my depth, and I had to fight to stay in that job for a year. Like I fought every day for a year to like not get kicked out of that job and essentially out of the country. Because without their sponsorship, I couldn't have stayed in the country. I was on a student visa with them, right? And I worked seven days a week for 365 days in a row. I basically almost lived in the office. I got an apartment a few blocks from the office and I had to. No one else was working those kind of hours, but I had to do the job, and I had to learn 3 new programming languages and all this technical stuff, how to write specs, how to write product specs like I had to research the history of various websites in parts of the internet. So I'm just, I guess I'm just giving some color to like when these doors open in your career and in your life, sometimes they're relationship doors that open, right? You meet somebody who's going to change your life, and it's like, are you going to fight to make that work? And, you know, like, so not all, it's not always career events, but when they happen, I think like trusting your instinct that this is one of those moments and knowing this is one of the, you can't do this throughout your whole life. You burn out and you die young. Like you're just not sustainable. But when they happen, are you going to put the burners on and be like, I'm in. And sometimes it only takes a few weeks. Like the most it's ever taken for me is a year to walk through a door. But like, anyway, like just saying that in case anyone here has one of these moments and like maybe this will resonate with one of you, and you'll be like, that's one of the moments I need to walk through the door.    Nate:  That concludes chapter one. In chapter 2, Bob talks about building companies. First, I asked Bob if he gained much leadership experience at Yelp.    Bob:  I gained some. I suppose my first year or two in the US was in a technical role. So I didn't have anyone reporting to me. I was just working on the user interface and front end stuff. So really no leadership there. But then, there was a day when we still had five people. Jeremy started to go pitch investors for our second round because we had really good traffic growth, right? In San Francisco, we had really nice charts showing traffic growth. We'd started to get traction in New York and started to get traction in LA. So we've had the start of a nice story, right? Like this works in other cities. We've got a model we can get traffic. And Jeremy went to his first VC pitch for the second round. And the VC said, you need to show that you can monetize the traffic before you raise this round. The growth story is fine, but you also need to say, we've signed 3 customers and they're paying this much, right, monthly. So Jeremy came back from that pitch, and I remember very clearly, he sat down, kind of slumped in his chair and he's like, oh man, we're going to have to do some sales before we can raise this next round. Like we need someone on the team to go close a few new clients. And it's so funny because it's like, me and four people and everyone went like this and faced me at the same time. And I was like, why are you looking at me? Like, I'm not, I didn't know how to start selling to local businesses. And they're like, they all looked at each other and went, no, we think you're probably the best for this, Bob. And they were all engineers, like all four of them were like, background in engineering. Even the CEO was VP engineering at PayPal before he did Yelp. So basically, we were all geeks. And for some reason, they thought I would be the best choice to sell to businesses. And I didn't really have a choice in it, honestly. I didn't want to do it. They were just like, you're like, that's what needs to happen next. And you're the most suitable candidate for it. So I I just started picking up the phone and calling dentists, chiropractors, restaurants. We didn't know if Yelp would resonate with bars or restaurants or healthcare. We thought healthcare was going to be big, which is reasonably big for Yelp now, but it's not the focus. But anyway, I just started calling these random businesses with great reviews. I just started with the best reviewed businesses. And the funny thing is some of those people, my first ever calls are still friends today, right? Like my chiropractor that I called is the second person I ever called and he signed up, ended up being my chiropractor for like 15 years living in San Francisco. And now we're still in touch, and we're great friends. So it's funny, like I dreaded those first calls, but they actually turned out to be really interesting people that I met. But yeah, we didn't have a model. We didn't know what to charge for. So we started out charging for calls. We changed the business's phone number. So if you're, you had a 415 number and you're a chiropractor on Yelp, we would change your number to like a number that Yelp owned, but it went straight through to their phone. So it was a transfer, but it meant our system could track that they got the call through Yelp, right? Yeah. And then we tracked the duration of the call. We couldn't hear the call, but we tracked the duration of the call. And then we could report back to them at the end of the month. You got 10 calls from Yelp this month and we're going to charge you $50 a call or whatever. So I sold that to 5 or 10 customers and people hated it. They hated that model because they're like, they'd get a call, it'd be like a wrong number or they just wanted to ask, they're already a current customer and they're asking about parking or something, right? So then we'd get back to and be like, you got a call and we charged you 50 bucks. So like, no, I can't pay you for that. Like, that was one of my current customers. So now the reality is they were getting loads of advertising and that was really driving the growth for their business, but they didn't want to pay for the call. So then I was like, that's not working. We have to do something else. Then we paid pay for click, which was we put ads on your page and when someone clicks it, they see you. And then people hated that too, because they're like, my mum just told me she's been like clicking on the link, right? Because she's like looking at my business. And my mum probably just cost me 5 bucks because she said she clicked it 10 times. And like, can you take that off my bill? So people hated the clicks. And then one day we just brought in a head of operations, Geoff Donaker. And by this point, by the way, I had like 2 salespeople working for me that I'd hired. And so it was me and two other people. We were calling these companies, signing these contracts. And one day I just had this epiphany. I was like, we should just pay for the ads that are viewed, not the ads that are clicked. In other words, pay for impressions to the ads. So if I tell you, I've put your ad in front of 500 people when they were looking for sushi this month, right? That you don't mind paying for because there's no action involved, but you're like, whoa, it's a big number. You put me in front of 500 people. I'll pay you 200 bucks for that. No problem. Essentially impression-based advertising. And I went to our COO and I was like, I think we should try this. He was like, if you want to give it a go. And I wrote up a contract and started selling it that day. And that is that format, that model now has a billion dollars revenue running through Yelp. So basically they took that model, like I switched it to impression-based advertising. And that was what was right for local. And our metrics were amazing. We're actually able to charge a lot more than we could in the previous two models. And I built out the sales team to about 20 people. Through that process, I got hooked, basically. Like I realized I love selling during that role. I would never have walked into sales, I think, unless everyone had gone, you have to do it. And I dreaded it, but I got really hooked on it. I love the adrenaline of it. I love hunting down these deals and I love like what you can learn from customers when you're selling. You can learn what they need and you can evolve your business model. So I love that flywheel and that's kind of what I've been doing ever since. But I built out a team of 20 people, so I got to learn management, essentially by just doing it at Yelp and building out that team.    Nate:  Next, I asked Bob how he developed his theory of leadership.    Bob:  I actually developed it really early on. You know, I mentioned earlier I'd been starting things since I was about 10 years old. And what's fascinated me between the age of like 10 and maybe, you know, my early 20s, I love the idea of creating stuff with people where no one gets paid. And here's why. These are charities and nonprofits and stuff, right? But I realized really early, if I can lead and motivate in a way where people want to contribute, even though they're not getting paid, and we can create stuff together, if I can learn that aspect, like management in that sense, then if I'm one day paying people, I'm going to get like, I'm going to, we're all going to be so much more effective, essentially, right? Like the organization is going to be so much more effective. And that is a concept I still work with today. Yes, we pay everyone quite well at Quid who works at Quid, right? Like we pay at or above market rate. But I never think about that. I never, ever ask for anything or work with people in a way that I feel they need to do it because that's their job ever. I just erased that from my mindset. I've never had that in my mindset. I always work with people with like, with gratitude and and in a way where I'm like, well, I'll try and make it fun and like help them see the meaning in the work, right? Like help them understand why it's an exciting thing to work on or a, why it's right for them, how it connects to their goals and their interests and why it's, you know, fun to contribute, whether it's to a client or to an area of technology or whatever we're working on. It's like, so yeah, I haven't really, I haven't, I mean, you guys might have read books on this, but I haven't really seen that idea articulated in quite the way that I think about it. And because I didn't read it in a book, I just kind of like stumbled across it as a kid. But that's, but I learned because I practiced it for 10 years before I even ended up in the US, when I started managing teams at Yelp, I found that I was very effective as a manager and a leader because I didn't take for granted that, you know, people had to do it because it was their job. I thought of ways to make the environment fun and make the connections between the different team members fun and teach them things and have there be like a culture of success and winning and sharing in the results of the wins together. And I suppose this did play out a little bit financially in my career because, although we pay people well at Yelp, we're kind of a somewhat mature business now. But in the early days of Yelp and in the early days of Quid, I never competed on pay. You know, when you're starting a company, it's a really bad idea to try and compete on pay. You have to, I went into every hiring conversation all the way through my early days at Yelp, as well as through the early days at Quid, like probably the first nearly 10 years at Quid. And every time I interviewed people, I would say early on, this isn't going to be where you earn the most money. I'm not going to be able to pay you market rate. You're going to earn less here than you could elsewhere. However, this is what I can offer you, right? Like whether then I make a culture that's about like helping learning. Like we always had a book like quota at Quid. If you want to buy books to read in your free time, I don't care what the title is, we'll give you money to buy books. And the reality is a book's like 10 bucks or 20 bucks, right? No one spends much on books, but that was one of the perks. I put together these perks so that we were paying often like half of what you could get in the market for the same role, but you're printing like reasons to be there that aren't about the money. Now, it doesn't work for everybody, you know, that's as in every company doesn't, but that's just what played out. And that's really important in the early days. You've got to be so efficient. And then once you start bringing in the money, then you can start moving up your rates and obviously pay people market rate. But early on, you've got to find ways to be really, really, really efficient and really lean. And you can't pay people market rate in the early days. I mean, people kind of expect that going into early stage companies, but I was particularly aggressive on that front. But that was just because I suppose it was in my DNA that like, I will try and give you other reasons to work here, but it's not going to be, it's not going to be for the money.    Nate:  Next, I asked Bob how he got from Yelp to Quid and how he knew it was time to launch his own company.    Bob:  Yeah, like looking back, if I'd made sort of the smart decision from a financial standpoint and from a, you know, career standpoint, I suppose you'd say, I would have just stayed put. if you're in a rocket ship and it's growing and you've got a senior role and you get to, you've got, you've earned the license to work on whatever you want. Like Yelp wanted me to move to Phoenix and create their first remote sales team. They wanted, I was running customer success at the time and I'd set up all those systems. Like there was so much to do. Yelp was only like three or four years old at the time, and it was clearly a rocket ship. And you know, I could have learned a lot more like from Yelp in that, like I could have seen it all the way through to IPO and, setting up remote teams and hiring hundreds of people, thousands of people eventually. So I, but I made the choice to leave relatively early and start my own thing. Just coming back to this idea we talked about in the session earlier today, I I always want to work on the forefront of whatever's going on, like the most important thing happening in our time. And I felt I knew what was next. I could kind of see what was next, which was applying AI to analyze the world's text, which was clear to me by about 2008, like that was going to be as big as the internet. That's kind of how I felt about it. And I told people that, and I put that in articles, and I put it in talks that are online that you can go watch. You know, there's one on my website from 10 years ago where I'd already been in the space for five or six years. You can go watch it and see what I was saying in 2015. So fortunately, I documented this because it sounds a bit, you know, unbelievable given what's just happened with large language models and open AI. But it was clear to me where things were going around 2008. And I just wanted to work on what was next, basically. I wanted to apply neural networks and natural language processing to massive text sets like all the world's media, all the world's social media. And yeah, I suppose whenever I've seen what's going to happen next, like with social network, going to Yelp, like seeing what was going to happen with social networking, going to building Yelp, and then seeing this observation about AI and going and doing Quid, it's not, it doesn't feel like a choice to me. It's felt like, well, just what I have to do. And regardless of whether that's going to be more work, harder work, less money, et cetera, it's just how I'm wired, I guess. And I'm kind of, I see it now. Like I see what's next now. And I'll probably just keep doing this. But I was really too early or very, very early, as you can probably see, to be trying to do that at like 2008, 2009, seven or eight years before OpenAI was founded, I was just banging my head against the wall for nearly a decade with no one that would listen. So even the best companies in the world and the biggest investors in the world, again, I won't name them, But it was so hard to raise money. It was so hard to get anyone to watch it that, after a time, I actually started to think I was wrong. Like after doing it for like 10 years and it hadn't taken off, I just started to think like, I was so wrong. I spent a year or two before ChatGPT took off. I'd got to a point where I'd spent like a year or two just thinking, how could my instinct be so wrong about what was going to play out here? How could we not have unlocked the world's written information at this point? And I started to think maybe it'll never happen, you know, and like I was simply wrong, which of course you could be wrong on these things. And then, you know, ChatGPT and OpenAI like totally blew up, and it's been bigger than even I imagined. And I couldn't have told you exactly which technical breakthrough was going to result in it. Like no one knew that large language models were going to be the unlock. But I played with everything available to try and unlock that value. And as soon as large language models became promising in 2016, we were on it, like literally the month that the Google BERT paper came out, because we were like knocking on that door for many years beforehand. And we were one of the teams that were like, trying to unlock that value. That's why many of the early Quid people are very senior at OpenAI and went on to take what they learned from Quid and then apply it in an OpenAI environment, which I'm very proud of. I'm very proud of those people, and it's amazing to see what they've done.    Nate:  That concludes Chapter 2. In Chapter 3, we discuss AI and social media. The first question was about anxiety and AI.    Bob:  Maybe I'll just focus on the anxiety and the issues first of all. A lot's been said on it. I suppose what would be my headlines? I think that one big area of concern is how it changes the job market. And I think the practical thing on that is if you can learn to be the bridge, then you're putting yourself in a really valuable position, right? Because if you can bridge this technology into businesses in a way that makes change and improvements, then you are moving yourself to a skill set that's going to continue to be really valuable. So that's just a practical matter. One of the executives I work with in a major US company likes to say will doctors become redundant because of AI? And he says, no, doctors won't be redundant, but doctors that don't use AI will be redundant. And that's kind of where we are, right? It's like, we're still going to need a person, but if you refuse, if you're not using it, you're going to fall behind and like that is going to put you at risk. So I think there is some truth to that little kind of illustrative story. There will be massive numbers of jobs that are no longer necessary. And the history of technology is full of these examples. Coming back to like 5,000 years ago, think of all the times that people invented stuff that made the prior roles redundant, right? In London, before electricity was discovered and harnessed, one of the biggest areas of employment was for the people that walked the streets at night, lighting the candles and gas lights that lit London. That was a huge breakthrough, right? You could put fire in the street, you put gas in the street and you lit London. Without that, you couldn't go out at night in London and like it would have been an absolute nightmare. The city wouldn't be what it is. But that meant there were like thousands of people whose job it was to light those candles and then go round in the morning when the sun came up and blow them out. So when the light bulb was invented, can you imagine the uproar in London where all these jobs were going to be lost, thousands of jobs were going to be lost. by people that no longer are needed to put out these lights. There were riots, right? There was massive social upheaval. The light bulb threatened and wiped out those jobs. How many people in London now work lighting gas lamps and lighting candles to light the streets, right? Nobody. That was unthinkable. How could you possibly take away those jobs? You know, people actually smashed these light bulbs when the first electric light bulbs were put into streets. People just went and smashed them because they're like, we are not going to let this technology take our jobs. And I can give you 20 more examples like that throughout history, right? Like you could probably think of loads yourselves. Even the motor car, you know, so many people were employed to look after horses, right? Think of all the people that were employed in major cities around the world, looking after horses and caring for them and building the carts and everything. And suddenly you don't need horses anymore. Like that wiped out an entire industry. But what did it do? It created the automobile industry, which has been employing massive numbers of people ever since. And the same is true for, you know, like what have light bulbs done for the quality of our lives? You know, we don't look at them now and think that's an evil technology that wiped out loads of jobs. We go, thank goodness we've got light bulbs. So the nature of technology is that it wipes out roles, and it creates roles. And I just don't see AI being any different. Humans have no limit to like, seem to have no limit to the comfort they want to live with and the things that we want in our lives. And those things are still really expensive and we don't, we're nowhere near satisfied. So like, we're going to keep driving forward. We're going to go, oh, now we can do that. Great. I can use AI, I can make movies and I can, you know, I don't know, like there's just loads of stuff that people are going to want to do with AI. Like, I mean, using the internet, how much time do we spend on these damn web forms, just clicking links and buttons and stuff? Is that fun? Do we even want to do that? No. Like we're just wasting hours of our lives every week, like clicking buttons. Like if we have agents, they can do that for us. So we have, I think we're a long way from like an optimal state where work is optional and we can just do the things that humans want to do with their time. And so, but that's the journey that I see us all along, you know. So anyway, that's just my take on AI and employment, both practically, what can you do about it? Be the bridge, embrace it, learn it, jump in. And also just like in a long arc, I'm not saying in the short term, there won't be riots and there won't be lots of people out of work. And I mean, there will be. But when we look back again, like I often think about what time period are we talking about? Right? People often like, well, what will it do to jobs? Next year, like there'll certain categories that will become redundant. But are we thinking about this in a one year period or 100 year period? Like it's worth asking yourself, what timeframe am I talking about? Right? And I always try and come back to the 100 year view at a minimum when talking about technology change. If it's better for humanity in 100 years, then we should probably work on it and make it happen, right? If we didn't do that, we wouldn't have any light bulbs in our house. Still be lighting candles?    Nate:  Next was a question about social media, fragmented attention, and how it drives isolation.    Bob:  Well, it's obviously been very problematic, particularly in the last five or six years. So TikTok gained success in the United States and around the world around five or six years ago with a completely new model for how to put content in front of people. And what powered it? AI. So TikTok is really an AI company. And the first touch point that most of us had with AI was actually through TikTok. It got so good at knowing the network of all possible content and knowing if you watch this, is the next thing we should show you to keep you engaged. And they didn't care if you were friends with someone or not. Your network didn't matter. Think about Facebook. Like for those of you that were using Facebook, maybe say 2010, right? Like 15 years ago. What did social media look like? You had a profile page, you uploaded photos of yourself and photos of your friends, you linked between them. And when you logged into Facebook, you basically just browsing people's profiles and seeing what they got up to at the weekend. That was social media 15 years ago. Now imagine, now think what you do when you're on Instagram and you're swiping, right? Or you go to TikTok and you're swiping. First of all, let's move to videos, which is a lot more compelling, short videos. And most of the content has nothing to do with your friends. So there was a massive evolution in social media that happened five or six years ago, driven by TikTok. And all the other companies had to basically adopt the same approach or they would have fallen too far behind. So it forced Meta to evolve Instagram and Facebook to be more about attention. Like there's always about attention, that's the nature of media. But these like AI powered ways to keep you there, regardless of what they're showing you. And that turned out to be a bit of a nightmare because it unleashed loads of content without any sense of like what's good for the people who are watching it, right? That's not the game they're playing. They're playing attention and then they're not making decisions about what might be good for you or not. So we went through like a real dip, I think, in social media, went through a real dip and we're still kind of in it, right, trying to find ways out of it. So regulation will ultimately be the savior, which it is in any new field of tech. Regulation is necessary to keep tech to have positive impact for the people that it's meant to be serving. And that's taken a long time to successfully put in place for social media, but we are getting there. I mean, Australia just banned social media for everyone under 16. You may have seen that. Happened, I think, earlier this year. France is putting controls around it. The UK is starting to put more controls around it. So, you know, gradually countries are voters are making it a requirement to put regulation around social media use. In terms of just practical things for you all, as you think about your own social media use, I think it's very healthy to think about how long you spend on it and find ways to just make it a little harder to access, right? Like none of us feel good when we spend a lot of time on our screens. None of us feel good when we spend a lot of time on social media. It feels good at the time because it's given us those quick dopamine hits. But then afterwards, we're like, man, I spent an hour, and I just like, I lost an hour down like the Instagram wormhole. And then we don't feel good afterwards. It affects us sleep negatively. And yeah, come to the question that was, posted, can create a sense of isolation or negative feelings of self due to comparison to centrally like models and actors and all these people that are like putting out content, right? Kind of super humans. So I think just finding ways to limit it and asking yourself what's right for you and then just sticking to that. And if that means coming off it for a month or coming off it for a couple of months, then, give that a try. Personally, I don't use it much at all. I'll use it mostly because friends will share like a funny meme or something and you just still want to watch it because it's like it's sent to you by a friend. It's a way of interacting. Like my dad sends me funny stuff from the internet, and I want to watch it because it's a way of connecting with him. But then I set a timer. I like to use this timer. It's like just a little physical device. I know we've all got one on our phones, but I like to have one on my desk. And so if I'm going into something, whether it's like I'm going to do an hour on my inbox, my e-mail inbox, or I'm going to, you know, open up Instagram and just swipe for a bit, I'll just set a timer, you know, and just keep me honest, like, okay, I'm going to give myself 8 minutes. I'm not going to give myself any more time on there. So there's limited it. And then I put all these apps in a folder on the second screen of my phone. So I can't easily access them. I don't even see them because they're on the second screen of my phone in a folder called social. So to access any of the apps, I have to swipe, open the folder, and then open the app. And just moving them to a place where I can't see them has been really helpful. I only put the healthy apps on my front page of my phone.    Nate:  Next was a question about where Bob expects AI to be in 20 years and whether there are new levels to be unlocked.    Bob:  No one knows. Right? Like what happens when you take a large language model from a trillion nodes to like 5 trillion nodes? No one knows. It's, this is where the question comes in around like consciousness, for example. Will it be, will it get to a point where we have to consider this entity conscious? Fiercely debated, not obvious at all. Will it become, it's already smarter than, well, it already knows more than any human on the planet. So in terms of its knowledge access, it knows more. In terms of most capabilities, most, you know, cognitive capabilities, it's already more capable than any single human on the planet. But there are certain aspects of consciousness, well, certain cognitive functions that humans currently are capable of that AI is not currently capable of, but we might expect some of those to be eaten into as these large language models get better. And it might be that these large language models have cognitive capabilities that humans don't have and never could have, right? Like levels of strategic thinking, for example, that we just can't possibly mirror. And that's one of the things that's kind of, you know, a concern to nations and to people is that, you know, we could end up with something on the planet that is a lot smarter than any one of us or even all of us combined. So in general, when something becomes more intelligent, it seeks to dominate everything else. That is a pattern. You can see that throughout all life. Nothing's ever got smarter and not sought to dominate. And so that's concerning, especially because it's trained on everything we've ever said and done. So I don't know why that pattern would be different. So that, you know, that's interesting. And and I think in terms of, so the part of that question, which is whole new areas of capability to be unlocked, really fascinating area to look at is not so much the text now, because everything I've written is already in these models, right? So the only way they can get more information is by the fact that like, loads of social networks are creating more information and so on. It's probably pretty duplicitous at this point. That's why Elon bought Twitter, for example, because he wanted the data in Twitter, and he wants that constant access to that data. But how much smarter can they get when they've already got everything ever written? However, large language models, of course, don't just apply to text. They apply to any information, genetics, photography, film, every form of information can be harnessed by these large language models and are being harnessed. And one area that's super interesting is robotics. So the robot is going to be as nimble and as capable as the training data that goes into it. And there isn't much robotic training data yet. But companies are now collecting robotic training data. So in the coming years, robots are going to get way more capable, thanks to large language models, but only as this data gets collected. So in other words, like language is kind of reaching its limits in terms of new capabilities, but think of all the other sensor types that could feed into large language models and you can start to see all kinds of future capabilities, which is why everyone suddenly got so interested in personal transportation vehicles and personal robotics, which is why like Tesla share price is up for example, right? Because Elon's committed now to kind of moving more into robotics with Tesla as a company. And there are going to be loads of amazing robotics companies that come out over the next like 10 or 20 years.    Nate:  And that brings us to the end of this episode with Bob Goodson. Like I mentioned in the intro, there were so many great nuggets from Bob. Such great insight on managing our careers, building companies, and the evolving impact of AI and social media. In summary, try to be at the intersection of new power and real problems. Seek to inspire rather than just transact, and be thoughtful about how to use social media and AI. All simple ideas, please, take them seriously.   

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, David O. Sacks, Roelof Botha, Chad Hurley, Russel Simmons, and Jeremy Stoppelman are among those considered the “PayPal Mafia”. These are cofounders or early team members of PayPal who went on to found or invest in major tech companies like Yelp, Palantir, YouTube, Facebook, SpaceX, X, LinkedIn, Affirm, Airbnb, and others. In this episode, CJ is joined by Jimmy Soni, bestselling author of The Founders, which chronicles the early years of PayPal. He delves into some of the lesser-known aspects of PayPal's history. He sheds light on Peter Thiel's prediction of the dot-com collapse, why he advocated for the employment of Roelof Botha as CFO at the age of just 26, and his second-chance philosophy for hiring failures. The conversation covers PayPal's “frenemy relationship” with eBay, how they convinced their users to advocate for them, and pivotal moments that influenced their IPO and sale. Tune in for unique insights into one of the most important "seed funds" in tech history.—LINKS:Jimmy Soni on X (@jimmyasoni): https://x.com/jimmyasoniJimmy Soni on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmysoniThe Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley: https://www.amazon.co.za/Founders-Paypal-Entrepreneurs-Shaped-Silicon/dp/1501197266CJ on X (@cjgustafson222): https://x.com/cjgustafson222Mostly metrics: http://mostlymetrics.comRELATED EPISODES:How Upwork CFO Erica Gessert Drove 20 Points of EBITDA Growth in Just 3 Quarters: —TIMESTAMPS:(00:00) Preview and Intro(02:12) Sponsor – Pulley | Brex | Aleph(07:40) Jimmy's Approach to Writing the Book(08:56) An Intro to the “PayPal Mafia”(10:57) The 1998 to 2002 Time Period(12:36) Present-Day Successes of “PayPal Mafia” Members(14:06) Challenges of Interviewing High-Profile Figures(16:06) Sponsor – RightRev | Navan | NetSuite(19:46) Comparisons to Other Influential Tech Groups(21:05) PayPal, YouTube, and the Embed Strategy(23:21) The Company's $20 Referral Program(27:10) Peter Thiel's Prediction of the Dot-Com Collapse(30:48) The Fallout From the Merger That Resulted in PayPal(33:00) The Evolution of PayPal's Business Model(36:58) The Unique Skillset That Roelof Botha Brought to the CFO Role(41:04)) Fraud-Fighting Techniques(43:26) PayPal's “Frenemy Relationship” With eBay(47:10) Challenges Faced by PayPal That Modern Fintechs Still Grapple With(49:13) How PayPal Made Its Users Advocates for the Business(53:44) PayPal's Talent Acquisition and “Misfits” Culture(56:54) Peter Thiel's Talent-Spotting Abilities and Second-Chance Philosophy(1:00:12) The Outcome of the eBay Sale(1:05:03) One of the Most Important “Seed Funds” in Tech History(1:08:07) Advice for Moving From Fast Work To Slow Work(1:11:18) Favorite Behind-the-Scenes Anecdote(1:13:04) The Most Underrated Member of the “Mafia”(1:14:04) One of the Most Pivotal Decisions Made(1:15:03) Wrap—SPONSORS:Pulley is the cap table management platform built for CFOs and finance leaders who need reliable, audit-ready data and intuitive workflows, without the hidden fees or unreliable support. Switch in as little as 5 days and get 25% off your first year: pulley.com/mostlymetrics.Brex offers the world's smartest corporate card on a full-stack global platform that is everything CFOs need to manage their finances on an elite level. Plus, they offer modern banking and treasury as well as intuitive expenses and accounting automation, bill pay, and travel. Find out more at brex.com/metricsAleph automates 90% of manual, error-prone busywork, so you can focus on the strategic work you were hired to do. Minimize busywork and maximize impact with the power of a web app, the flexibility of spreadsheets, and the magic of AI. Get a personalised demo at getaleph.com/runRightRev automates the revenue recognition process from end to end, gives you real-time insights, and ensures ASC 606 / IFRS 15 compliance—all while closing books faster. For RevRec that auditors actually trust, visit rightrev.com and schedule a demo.Navan is the all-in-one travel and expense solution that helps finance teams streamline reconciliation, enforce policies automatically, and gain real-time visibility. It connects to your existing cards and makes closing the books faster and smarter. Visit navan.com/Runthenumbers for your demo.NetSuite is an AI-powered business management suite, encompassing ERP/Financials, CRM, and ecommerce for more than 41,000 customers. If you're looking for an ERP, head to https://netsuite.com/metrics and get the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning.#PayPalMafia #JimmySoni #CAPTCHA #PayPal #fintech Get full access to Mostly metrics at www.mostlymetrics.com/subscribe

It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us? And is Google Search finally facing a real rival, in the form of A.I.-powered “answer engines”?  SOURCES:Marissa Mayer, co-founder of Sunshine; former C.E.O. of Yahoo! and vice president at Google.Ryan McDevitt; professor of economics at Duke University.Tim Hwang, media researcher and author; former Google employee.Elizabeth Reid, vice president of Search at Google.Aravind Srinivas, C.E.O. and co-founder of Perplexity.Jeremy Stoppelman, C.E.O. and co-founder of Yelp. RESOURCES:“A Fraudster Who Just Can't Seem to Stop … Selling Eyeglasses,” by David Segal (The New York Times, 2022).Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, by Tim Hwang (2020).“Complaint: U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC,” by the U.S. Department of Justice (2020).“Fake Online Locksmiths May Be Out to Pick Your Pocket, Too,” by David Segal (The New York Times, 2016).“‘A' Business by Any Other Name: Firm Name Choice as a Signal of Firm Quality,” by Ryan C. McDevitt (Journal of Political Economy, 2014).In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, by Steven Levy (2011).“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1998). EXTRAS:“Is Dialysis a Test Case of Medicare for All?” by Freakonomics Radio (2021).“How Big is My Penis? (And Other Things We Ask Google),” by Freakonomics Radio (2017).

The activist investor pushing Yelp to explore a sale told CNBC's Deirdre Bosa that CEO Jeremy Stoppelman uses the company as his own personal piggy bank while the rest of us lose money, thanks to a “puppet board.” Plus, generative AI use has surged at enterprises, according to a new report from data management startup Databricks. 

Yelp is closing three of its U.S. offices after finding most of its employees prefer to work remotely. In a blog post, Yelp Co-Founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said the company will close its offices in New York, Washington and Chicago on July 29. The online review and reservation company also plans to downsize its office in Phoenix. The offices the company is closing were its most “consistently underutilized," with only about 2% of workspaces in use each week, Stoppelman said. San Francisco-based Yelp announced a remote-first work model in February 2021. Stoppelman said Yelp has proven it can be successful with a remote workforce, noting that the company achieved record revenue of just over $1 billion in 2021. “Yelp continues to experience the benefits of a remote workplace and it's the clear path forward for us," Stoppelman wrote in the blog post. Stoppelman said internal surveys show 86% of Yelp workers prefer to work remotely all or most of the time, while 87% said that working remotely makes them more effective. Since the company began reopening its offices about nine months ago, only 1% of the company's global workforce is coming into an office every day. Stoppelman said the remote-first policy has also helped with recruiting. “Our workforce was previously concentrated in the areas where we have offices, and now we have employees spread across every state in the U.S. and four countries,” Stoppelman wrote. Yelp, which has 4,400 employees, said offices in San Francisco, London, Toronto and other locations will remain open for now. This article was provided by The Associated Press.

Kara and Scott are back with a Quarterly Review, to see how our predictions from the past quarter have held up. We'll also get some predictions for the next quarter from Friends of Pivot, including Preet Bharara, host of Stay Tuned with Preet, Jeremy Stoppelman, Co-Founder and CEO of Yelp, Edward Ongweso Jr. of Vice's Motherboard, and Cecilia Kang of The New York Times. You can find Preet on Twitter at @PreetBharara, Jeremy at @jeremys, Edward at @bigblackjacobin, and Cecilia at @ceciliakang. Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa, at nymag.com/pivot. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Shop Talk looks at the origins of some popular business idioms. Caught My Eye explores the new phenomena of job seekers who ghost employers after accepting employment. The tables have turned as employers are getting a taste of their bad behavior in the treatment of applicants. Also, three Class Action Lawsuits have been filed against Kellogg's for lack of strawberries in Strawberry Pop Tart products. Our Business Birthday is Jeremy Stoppelman, born November 10th and he is 44 today. The co-founder of YELP, he is a voracious reader of non-fiction and worth about $243 million.We're all business. Except when we're not.Apple Podcasts: apple.co/1WwDBrCSpotify: spoti.fi/2pC19B1iHeart Radio: bit.ly/2n0Z7H1Tunein: bit.ly/1SE3NMbStitcher: bit.ly/1N97ZquGoogle Podcasts: bit.ly/1pQTcVWPandora: pdora.co/2pEfctjYouTube: bit.ly/1spAF5aAlso follow Tim and John on:Facebook: www.facebook.com/focusgroupradioTwitter: www.twitter.com/focusgroupradioInstagram: www.instagram.com/focusgroupradio

We can look around at distributed banking, crypto-currencies, Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, and so many other innovative business strategies as new and exciting and innovative. And they are. But paving the way for them was simplifying online payments to what I've heard Elon Musk call just some rows in a database.  Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and former Netscaper Luke Nosek had this idea in 1998. Levchin and Nosek has worked together on a startup called SponsorNet New Media while at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana where PLATO and Mosaic had come out of. And SponsorNet was supposed to sell online banner ads but would instead be one of four failed startups before zeroing in on this new thing, where they would enable digital payments for businesses and make it simple for consumers to buy things online. They called the company Confinity and setup shop in beautiful Mountain View, California. It was an era when a number of organizations were doing things in taking payments online that weren't so great. Companies would cache credit card numbers on sites, many had weak security, and the rush to sell everything  in the bubble forming around dot-coms fueled a knack for speed over security, privacy, or even reliability.  Confinity would store the private information in its own banking vaults, keep it secure, and provide access to vendors - taking a small charge per-transaction. Where large companies had been able to build systems to take online payments, now small businesses and emerging online stores could compete with the big boys. Thiel and Levchin had hit on something when they launched a service called PayPal, to provide a digital wallet and enable online transactions. They even accepted venture funding, taking $3 million from banks like Deutsche Bank over Palm Pilots. One of those funders was Nokia, investing in PayPal expanding into digital services for the growing mobile commerce market. And by 2000 they were up to 1,000,000 users.  They saw an opening to make a purchase from a browser on a phone or a browser or app on a cell phone using one of those new smart phone ideas. And they were all rewarded with over 10 million people using the site in just three short years, processing a whopping $3 billion in transactions.  Now this was the heart of the dot-com bubble. In that time, Elon Musk managed to sell his early startup Zip2, which made city guides on the early internet, to Compaq for around $300 million, pocketing $22 million for himself. He parlayed that payday into X.com, another online payment company. X.com exploded to over 200,000 customers quickly and as happens frequently with rapid acceleration, a young Musk found himself with a new boss - Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit.  And they helped invent many of the ways we do business online at that time. One of my favorite of Levchin's contributions to computing, the Gausebeck-Levchin test, is one of the earliest implementations of what we now call CAPTCHA - you know when you're shown a series of letters and asked to type them in to eliminate bots.  Harris helped the investors de-risk by merging with Confinity to form X.com. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are larger than life minds in Silicon Valley. The two were substantially different. Musk took on the CEO role but Musk and Thiel were at heads. Thiel believed in a Linux ecosystem and Musk believed in a Windows ecosystem. Thiel wanted to focus on money transfers, similar to the PayPal of today. Given that those were just rows in a database, it was natural that that kind of business would become a red ocean and indeed today there are dozens of organizations focused on it. But Paypal remains the largest. So Musk also wanted to become a full online banking system - much more ambitious. Ultimately Thiel won and assumed the title of CEO.  They remained a money transmitter and not a full bank. This means they keep funds that have been sent and not picked up, in an interest bearing account at a bank.  They renamed the company to PayPal in 2001 and focused on taking the company public, with an IPO as PYPL in 2002. The stock shot up 50% in the first day of trading, closing at $20 per share. Yet another example of the survivors of the dot com bubble increasing the magnitude of valuations. By then, most eBay transactions accepted PayPal and seeing an opportunity, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion later in 2002. Suddenly PayPal was the default option for closed auctions and would continue their meteoric rise. Musk is widely reported to have made almost $200 million when eBay bought PayPal and Thiel is reported to have made over $50 million.  Under eBay, PayPal would grow and as with most companies that IPO, see a red ocean form in their space. But they brought in people like Ken Howery, who serve as the VP of corporate development, would later cofound investment firm Founders Fund with Thiel, and then become the US Ambassador to Sweden under Trump. And he's the first of what's called the PayPal Mafia, a couple dozen extremely influential personalities in tech.  By 2003, PayPal had become the largest payment processor for gambling websites. Yet they walked away from that business to avoid some of the complicated regulations until various countries that could verify a license for online gambling venues.  In 2006 they added security keys and moved to sending codes to phones for a second factor of security validation. In 2008 they bought Fraud Sciences to gain access to better online risk management tools and Bill Me Later. As the company grew, they setup a company in the UK and began doing business internationally. They moved their EU presence to Luxembourg 2007. They've often found themselves embroiled in politics, blocking the any political financing accounts, Alex Jones show InfoWars, and one of the more challenging for them, WikiLeaks in 2010. This led to them being attacked by members of Anonymous for a series of denial of service attacks that brought the PayPal site down. OK, so that early CAPTCHA was just one way PayPal was keeping us secure. It turns out that moving money is complicated, even the $3 you paid for that special Golden Girls t-shirt you bought for a steal on eBay. For example, US States require reporting certain transactions, some countries require actual government approval to move money internationally, some require a data center in the country, like Turkey. So on a case-by-case basis PayPal has had to decide if it's worth it to increase the complexity of the code and spend precious development cycles to support a given country. In some cases, they can step in and, for example, connect the Baidu wallet to PayPal merchants in support of connecting China to PayPal.  They were spun back out of eBay in 2014 and acquired Xoom for $1 billion in 2015, iZettle for $2.2 billion, who also does point of sales systems. And surprisingly they bought online coupon aggregator Honey for $4B in 2019. But their best acquisition to many would be tiny app payment processor Venmo for $26 million. I say this because a friend claimed they prefer that to PayPal because they like the “little guy.” Out of nowhere, just a little more than 20 years ago, the founders of PayPal and they and a number of their initial employees willed a now Fortune 500 company into existence. While they were growing, they had to learn about and understand so many capital markets and regulations. This sometimes showed them how they could better invest money. And many of those early employees went on to have substantial impacts in technology. That brain drain helped fuel the Web 2.0 companies that rose.  One of the most substantial ways was with the investment activities. Thiel would go on to put $10 million of his money into Clarium Capital Management, a hedge fund, and Palantir, a big data AI company with a focus on the intelligence industry, who now has a $45 billion market cap. And he funded another organization who doesn't at all use our big private data for anything, called Facebook. He put half a million into Facebook as an angel investor - an investment that has paid back billions. He's also launched the Founders Fund, Valar Venture, and is a partner at Y Combinator, in capacities where he's funded everyone from LinkedIn and Airbnb to Stripe to Yelp to Spotify, to SpaceX to Asana and the list goes on and on and on.  Musk has helped take so many industries online. Why not just apply that startup modality to space - so launched SpaceX and to cars, so helped launch (and backed financially) Tesla and solar power, so launched Solar City and building tunnels so launched The Boring Company. He dabbles in Hyperloops (thus the need for tunnels) and OpenAI and well, whatever he wants. He's even done cameos in movies like Iron Man. He's certainly a personality.  Max Levchin would remain the CTO and then co-found and become the CEO of Affirm, a public fintech company.  David Sacks was the COO at PayPal and founded Yammer. Roelof Botha is the former CFO at PayPal who became a partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the top venture capital firms. Yishan Wong was an engineering manager at PayPal who became the CEO of Reddit. Steve Chen left to join Facebook but hooked back up with Jawed Karim for a new project, who he studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana with. They were joined by Chad Hurley, who had created the original PayPal logo, to found YouTube. They sold it to Google for $1.65 billion in 2006. Hurley now owns part of the Golden State Warriors, the MLS Los Angeles team, and Leeds United. Reid Hoffman was another COO at PayPal, who Thiel termed the “firefighter-in-chief” and left to found LinkedIn. After selling LinkedIn to Microsoft for over $26 billion he become a partner at venture capital firm, Greylock Partners.  Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons co-founded Yelp with $1 million in funding from Max Levchin, taking the company public in 2011. And the list goes on. PayPal paved the way for small transactions on the Internet. A playbook repeated in different parts of the sector by the likes of Square, Stripe, Dwolla, Due, and many others - including Apple Pay, Amazon Payments, and Google Wallet. We live in an era now, where practically every industry has been taken online. Heck, even cars. In the next episode we'll look at just that, exploring the next steps in Elon Musk's career after leaving PayPal. 

X1 Card is raising a $12 million funding round. The company is building a credit card that sets limits based on your current and future income, not your credit score. Spark Capital is leading the round with Jared Leto, Aaron Levie, Jeremy Stoppelman, Max Levchin and Ali Rowghani also participating. American Express veteran Ash Gupta […]

X1 Card is raising a $12 million funding round. The company is building a credit card that sets limits based on your current and future income, not your credit score. Spark Capital is leading the round with Jared Leto, Aaron Levie, Jeremy Stoppelman, Max Levchin and Ali Rowghani also participating. American Express veteran Ash Gupta […]

Produced by Foundersuite.com, "How I Raised It" goes behind the scenes with startup founders who have raised capital. This episode is with Brian Vallelunga of Doppler.com a platform for managing environment variables (e.g. API keys) for developers. In this episode, Brian talks about raising a pre-seed round from Kleiner while he was still working at Uber, applying to Y Combinator for the 6th or 7th time, pitching a long-term massive vision (even in the early days), resisting the temptation of initial offers and the search for "partners not capital," how he made his investor intros go viral, pitching Peter Thiel, the importance of managing dilution, and much more. The Company raised raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Sequoia Capital. Abstract Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Soma Capital, Nat Friedman, Aaron Levie, Dylan Field, Ben Porterfield, Jeremy Stoppelman, Kevin Hartz, Jeff Holden, Greg Brockman, Jeffrey Queisser and Peter Thiel also participated in the round. How I Raised It is produced by Foundersuite, makers of software to raise capital and manage investor relations. Foundersuite's customers have raised over $2.5 Billion since 2016. Create a free account at www.foundersuite.com

The Coronavirus is just one of the many challenges consumer-user review site Yelp has faced in recent months, for both its clients and its employees. In this edition of Bloomberg Studio 1.0, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman sits down with Emily Chang to discuss the challenges of doing business in a pandemic, signs of resiliency in the restaurant and food business as well as the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit of rival Google.

Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman says his leadership team anticipated a "nuclear winter" after the pandemic hit. But as businesses start to re-open, and ad revenues on the site creep back up, Yelp is bringing back furloughed employees and adding Covid-conscious features to its listings. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times. Order the How I Built This book at:https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThis

In this episode, Erasmus Elsner is talking to Mike Ghaffary, general partner at Canvas Ventures about his journey as app builder, co-founder of Stitcher, CEO at Eat24, to becoming a successful angel investor and now institutional venture investor at Canvas. 00:00 Intro 02:21 Swiss army knife of education 04:04 Business school after Dotcom bubble burst 05:06 Founding Stitcher 06:14 Focusing on news 08:03 Becoming CEO of Eat24 09:39 Growing Eat24 from 10FTEs to $700m top line 10:45 Food delivery wars 11:55 Grubhub Partnership that never launched 13:12 Jeremy Stoppelman and Steve Jobs on search on mobile 14:30 Becoming a successful angel investor 15:35 Paying off graduate debt by making the most expensive iPhone app ever 16:37 Angel investment in Strava 17:20 Angel investment in Superhuman 17:50 Joining Social Capital 19:58 Mike’s experience at Social Capital 20:28 CloudKitchens investment 21:30 HubHaus investment 22:37 Joining Canvas Ventures 24:04 Flyhomes investment 27:52 Marketplace Deep Dive 28:27 Lenny Rachitsky: focus on supply or demand side? 30:06 Thomas Eisenmann: Two-sided networks 30:57 Uber: demand side vs. supply side subsidies 32:09 Local vs. global network effects 33:24 Sarah Tavel (Benchmark): Unlocking new supply in delivery wars 34:21 Local delivery war zones 35:36 Uber Eats entering the market 37:04 Public vs. privately held delivery war contenders 38:54 Marketplace take rate 40:38 Out-of bound marketplace take rates 41:57 Zero percent take rate 43:02 Finding out more about Mike

Antitrust criticism of big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have been louder than ever — from the consumers to the tech companies who compete with them. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been vocal for years about the problem with Google’s dominant market share in maps, local search, and reviews. “I’ve been working on it for over a decade and it’s great to see that more people have jumped on board.” Stoppelman says. “When we started out criticizing Google and highlighting some of their abuses, we got — especially from Silicon Valley — so many eye rolls.” The Verge’s Nilay Patel and Casey Newton recently caught up with Stoppelman to discuss the evolving view of the media and the public on the tech monopolies, as well as how Yelp is handling their competition and what possible changes can be made with regulation from the government. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael is one of the most sought after and prolific angel investors in LA.  One year he invested in 50 companies... and that was before joining a prominent scout program.  We also talk about growing Yelp with his brother Jeremy Stoppelman.  

Paypal Mafyası | #59 - 26.11.2019 Bilal Eren ve Cem Sünbül ile dijitalleşmenin hayatımıza etkilerini her salı 22.00'da bir başka konuyla ele alan DijitalHayatTV YouTube/Facebook/Periscope yayınımızda bugün; - Paypal Mafyası Nedir? - Paypal'ı Kuranlar Kimler? Paypal'ın Hikayesi Ne? - Paypal Mafyası İsmi Nereden Geliyor? - Paypal'ı Kuran 14 Kişi Kim? - Paypal Sonrası Neler Yaptılar? - Dünyayı Değiştiren Girişimcilerin Hayat Hikayeleri? - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, Dave McClure, David O. Sacks, Premal Shah, Russel Simmons, Jeremy Stoppelman, Andrew McCormack, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Keith Rabois, Roelof Botha ve Paypal Mafyası Başlıklarını konuştuk. Haftaya salı saat 22.00'da görüşmek üzere. Hem canlı hem de geçmiş yayınlarımız için tıklayın; YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dijitalhayattv Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dijitalhayattv Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/dijitalhayattv Web: https://www.dijitalhayat.tv

In 2004, two former Paypal engineers, Jeremy Stoppelman and Russ Simmons, were spit-balling new internet ideas. Out of their brainstorm came a site where you would email your friends asking for local business recommendations. The launch was a flop, but they discovered that people seemed to enjoy writing reviews not just for friends, but for the general public. Fifteen years later, Yelp is a publicly traded company with more than 4,000 employees and over 140 million monthly visitors. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," Liz Bales explains how putting cat food inside plastic mice became her full-time business and why it could revolutionize the way humans feed their cats.

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Jeremy Stoppelman, founder of Yelp, to talk about the early days of "user-generated content” (3:50), when ‘Yelp’ became a verb (7:10), when Google took notice (9:00), becoming a resource for the search giant (11:35), when Google tried to buy Yelp (12:40), testifying in Congress (13:40), Google’s dirty deeds (16:00), Google’s unseen power (18:50), whether Trump is good for Yelp (23:20), the coming crackdown (25:50), if it is possible to survive (28:50), being targeted by an activist investor (33:00), the evolution of the internet (36:10), being the David to Google’s Goliath (39:20), getting targeted by critics (45:45), and the Silicon Valley bubble (48:30). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Listen to any earnings call on demand with the Borsa Earnings Call mobile app now on the App Store. Download here: bit.ly/FreeQuarterlyEarningsCalls Welcome to Earnings Season. Our goal is to make listening to earnings calls easier. We upload relevant and newsworthy earnings calls for easy listening. To request a company's earnings call, email borsaHQ@gmail.com. This podcast episode is Yelp's Q3 2018 earnings call. Listen to Jeremy Stoppelman discuss his company's performance. About Earnings Season: Earnings Season posts relevant earnings calls for an easy listening experience. Email borsahq@gmail.com to request a company.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about the phenomenon of techlash and why people are just now "waking up" to Silicon Valley's dark side. Stoppelman's company has feuded for years with its much larger rival Google, which Yelp says has unfairly weighted local search results to its own product. He says the Google of 2004 would laugh at how the company does business today, and praises the new regulations being brought against tech giants by the EU. However, Stoppelman suggests he's not optimistic about U.S. lawmakers taking similar action, even though scrutiny of the big companies seems to have united Democrats and Republicans for once. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mariam Naficy has pioneered consumer Internet models since 1998, when she co-founded the first online cosmetics retailer, Eve.com, which was sold for over $100 million. Today, Mariam is the Founder & CEO @ Minted, the startup that uses crowdsourcing and analytics to bring the best designs to market faster than anyone. To date, Mariam has raised &89m in VC funding with Minted from some of the best in the business including our favourites Floodgate, Benchmark, Menlo, Slow, Ridge Ventures and then prominent individuals such as Marissa Meyer and Jeremy Stoppelman. In addition, Mariam sits on the Board of Yelp and Every Mother Counts. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Mariam made her way into startups from investment banking and came to sell her first startup, Eve, for $100m in cash within a year before founding Minted? 2.) What were the biggest lessons Mariam learnt from Eve and applied to Minted? Why did Mariam not want to pursue VC funding in the beginning with Minted? What was the inflection point in not taking VC to taking VC funds? 3.) How did Mariam think about capital efficiency in the early days of Minted? How did Mariam see that change with the sudden injection of VC capital? In the heavily funded landscape today, would Mariam have raised VC money from the start, if starting today? 4.) Mariam is a master of internal upscaling, what is the secret to creating a culture of internal continuous learning? Why is rotation within the company roles such a core element? How has Mariam's assessment of people talent changed over the years? 5.) What would Mariam say is her greatest strength and he greatest weakness as a CEO? How has she seen this change with her 20 years of founding companies? How did having children change her outlook on managing people? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Mariam’s Fave Book: The Effective Executive As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Mariam on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital.  Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also at cooleygo.com. Zoom, fastest growing video and web conferencing service, providing one consistent enterprise experience that allows you to engage in an array of activities including video meetings and webinars, collaboration-enabled conference rooms, and persistent chat all in one easy platform. Plus, it is the easiest solution to manage, scale, and use, and has the most straightforward, affordable pricing. Don’t take our word for it. Zoom is the top rated conferencing app across various user review sites including G2Crowd and Trust Radius. And you can sign up for a free account (not a trial!). Just visit Zoom.us.

In Episode 48 of The Startup Playbook Podcast, my guest is Dave Scheine, an angel investor, startup advisor and global expansion expert. Dave can be considered one of the leading experts when it comes to global expansion. He helped expand Google's offices and launch products such as G Suite in countries like India, Ireland and Poland, before moving on to join Yelp as their first International hire and helped them expand into 30 different countries during his role there as the Director of European Operations and the Director for the Asia Pacific region. He's now based in Melbourne where he advises and sits on the board of several startups, angel invests in the companies and is actively helping to grow the Australian startup ecosystem. In the episode we chat about the metrics Dave looked at when deciding where and how to expand, what makes a good mentor/ mentee relationship and why teams are the most important things that investors look for. Send your questions for Episode 50 to -  rohit@startupplaybook.co Show notes: - Harvard - Standford - G Suite - Yelp - Jeremy Stoppelman - Rhonda Kallman - ANZ - Telstra - Sheryl Sandberg - Startmate - Daimler Chrysler - Honee - Matt Jones - Zomato - UrbanSpoon - Dave Scheine Feedback/ connect/ say hello:  Rohit@startupplaybook.co @playbookstartup (Twitter) @rohitbhargava7 (Twitter – Rohit) Rohit Bhargava (LinkedIn) Credits: Intro music credit to Bensound The post Ep048 – Dave Scheine (Angel Investor) on winning globally appeared first on Startup Playbook.

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman talks with Kara Swisher about spending a decade at the helm of the local-recommendations site, and the new challenges posed by private companies that can out-raise the public Yelp. He also explains why he thinks quasi-competitor Google has ?lost its mind.? Later on: Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode don virtual reality headsets that are powered by smartphones and talk about the inevitable dystopian future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yelp provides user-generated reviews of local businesses through its website and mobile app. Its contributors provide their opinions on a variety of businesses, ranging from clothing stores to restaurants. Prior to launching Yelp, Jeremy worked at Paypal. Yelp went public in 2012. Jeremy speaks with Jessica Harris about how he launched Yelp, from scratch. Listen […]

More Californians are on Facebook than voted in the general election. If the government could tap into that social engagement, governing could grow more collaborative, open, accountable and transparent. Creating a digital town square is the concept behind "Citizenville," a new book by California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom. At this Milken Institute Forum, Moderated by Kara Swisher, co-executive editor of AllThingsD, Newsom will discuss how to draw on this digital revolution to make government more user-friendly. Named the "Most Social Mayor in America," Newsom knows what he's talking about. He has more than 1 million followers on Twitter and 108,000 Facebook friends, and is active on Pinterest, YouTube and Flickr. For the book, he interviewed dozens of innovators, including Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman, new-media expert Arianna Huffington and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams. Newsom's fan base extends beyond the digirati. President Clinton said, "'Citizenville' makes a fascinating case for a more engaged government, transformed to meet the challenges and possibilities of the 21st century, and where technology brings the critical tools of our democracy closer to its citizens than ever before."

Download the MP3. Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, a site where users can write and share reviews of local businesses. Everyone's now a restaurant critic. However, local reviews were not the original focus, but just one of several features in the earlier versions of the site. Noticing the growth of this buried feature, Yelp re-tooled the site around reviews and hasn't looked back since. Does this story sound familiar? Jeremy's the former VP of Engineering at PayPal, which also had to drastically alter its business early in its life. Listen in to hear Jeremy's thoughts on growing a local enterprise, giving users and identity, and how to recognize and act upon the need for change.

Jeremy Stoppelman is the co-founder and CEO of Yelp, a site where users can write and share reviews of local businesses. Everyone’s now a restaurant critic. However, local reviews were not the original focus, but just one of several features in the earlier versions of the site.…