YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeremy Stoppelman

lines on the record: 84
first: 2015-12-21
most recent: 2015-12-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, the most amusing one recently was even if you typed into Google, like TripAdvisor Hilton or Yelp Sumo, the sushi place.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are lots of people that feel very strongly in the same way that I do. Tons of people. But very few have been able to step out of the shadows and publicly talk about this stuff. And so I don't know. Maybe it's just my personality. Maybe I'm a little bit scrappy by nature. But yeah, I mean, we've always been very public”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so he said that doesn't make sense. And we dropped out. And there was a little bit of a standoff for maybe a year or so where they kind of tried to struggle without our content on their own. And the final insult was they no longer had our license content. And so then they decided, you know what, we're just going to steal their content. So they used their web crawl because, of course, we have to give them all of our content or web search monopoly. And they put all of our reviews back into their competitive product where they were collecting reviews on top of that. And so that's where we just said, all right, gloves off, and it's time to go testify to Congress. We got invited. You're one of the few that really has been. Yeah, I mean, the reality is”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was Google and we wanted to be friends. So we said okay. And then the straw that broke the camels back with our relationship was when they said, yeah, we want and we're going to have your content here on this page, but we're also going to collect reviews on top of that and we're going to push your content down. And so it became clear that we're just backfill for building up a Google property”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of our traffic has always come from organic web search, not necessarily the maps product. The maps product was more and more competitive, and so that was siphoning off traffic, and we actually weren't getting very much. And so we were building this secondary page that was competing with ourselves.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's about right. Okay. That's a good analogy. So we're working with them. Their page just starts looking more and more like a Yelp page built out of Yelp content. And so that started feeling weird. But so long as they weren't actually gathering content themselves, it felt like, okay, well, it's Google. The dominant player at search really, they've become the de facto monopoly.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that led them naturally to the top content providers, people like myself or our company Yelp, as well as TripAdvisor, name your sort of top content providers. There's only a handful of them out there. And it led them to license that content, bring it into Google, and try to enhance their Maps product. And they swore up and down that this was still all about being a great partner, and it's going to be win win. And we felt like, hey, there's a shot that it's still going to be win-win. And we actually admire Google quite a bit. And working with them was very exciting at the time. But it became clear that”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“at a time when Google was saying, hey, we want to be a turnstile. And don't build websites for computers, build websites for users. Just have great content. And if the users love your content, then we will send, you know, there was kind of an implicit trade there. Give us all your content. Let us have all of your content. We'll index it. And as a reward for that, we'll send those users. Back to you. If you're doing the right things, you get rewarded. And that worked initially. And we start getting traffic and building our community that way. And over time, I think Google realized that local is really important. And they wanted to invest there. And so it started with a maps investment and then started tiptoeing into more of the local, you know, which businesses should you go to”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So being public, you have certain things you're restricted from saying, certain things in terms of behaviors and things like that where you can't just be sort of out there. One of the things you've been doing rather vocally, though, is attacking Google, not attacking, criticizing Google. That's not the right word, for their behaviors. And it's something that's been an issue for Yelp for years because of the things Google is adding into its mobile, especially its mobile products. Talk a little bit about that, where that is right now, because this is a company that almost bought you at one point.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if you have the option, even if your valuation is lower and you can go public and you're in that kind of late stage position, that's definitely the way to go.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's played out entirely. I think companies that are in that position are probably looking at how do they manage costs more carefully, how do they extend their runway. Because if you end up in a down round situation, the way that that works, I...”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They kind of have two choices. One is kind of the square choice, which is, hey, your price might be lower than your last round, but you have built a real business and you can go public and everything will be fine. Like you just kind of have to get through that initial. News of hey, your valuation has changed. And so that can be bumpy, but ultimately you do it and you're fine in the end. And people forget about it probably six months from now. I think there's the other side of it, which is you didn't build a real business yet. You're still nascent, but you have this very high valuation and the environment has changed. And so what do you...”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do. I think that it's out there. You can see the mark to mark to markets that are happening. And I think for some companies, they're stuck.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You can't do that forever on the unicorn side. And depending on who you took investment from, apparently that can result in you being marked to market anyways. And so some of you are seeing a little bit of a convergence there where it's like, okay, we had this period where some companies were able to absorb capital. And not be traded publicly, but now that that period seems to be ending.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say over the last couple years it became more difficult to be a public company CEO because you are competing at some level, not necessarily directly, but with unicorns and ever-rising valuations and no volatility. And so when you're trying to sell potential candidate, you've got this volatile stock thing you're dealing with that may go up, may go down, can help some company where it just feels so much more stable. And it's not actually as, you know, obviously there's perceptions that are moving up and down, but the stock price isn't floating. And there's some value in that. But I think now what we're seeing.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I've always tried to carve out time for product because it's kind of an area of passion in the early days of Yelp. I was essentially the product manager. That was my job. And I think it's important, especially if you're the founding CEO, to, you know, usually you add a unique element of value to the company. And if you find yourself being completely drawn away from that, one, the company's losing out because that was your special skill to begin with. And two, also, I think it can lead to burnout. Suddenly you're not doing anything that you're totally passionate about and totally engaged in feel really rewarded by. And so I've always tried to balance the orgs such that I can spend some of my time on product. But I certainly can't spend the time that I used to because you're a public company. We were a 10-person company. How do you let companies see that? How do you feel?”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that there's anything I could say. I got exactly right. Even today when I look at our best features, best functionality, our app is obviously a really exciting thing for the company and a place where we pour lots of resources and focus, but there's always a pages or areas of it where I just cringe and I'm like, damn it, we built that once three years ago. We haven't revisited it. It's just a mess. So I think any product person or product focused person. Has a hard time saying it's done, it's perfect. I've nailed it. There's always, well, let's try this, let's try that, or it's not quite right. You spend most of your time thinking.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I guess from a feature standpoint, everyone lost their mind over the check-in for a while. And we added it, and it still remains an important contribution type for us, but it's just one of many contribution types. I mean, photos and reviews are still the main event at Yelp. But that was something where...”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ponzi scheme there. So it's interesting though that these manias or these sort of moments of excitement sometimes turn out to be really big trends. Obviously mobile was. And then other times everyone buys in. Everyone's excited about it. And then it just kind of fades. What's another one background?”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where we had to decide do we take our fledgling relatively small engineering team and take them off our core product and go and build something inside Facebook. And we opted to make a very tiny investment where it was just literally me as kind of the product manager. And our VP of engineering did some prototyping, but we didn't bet the farm. On Facebook. And looking back on that, it saved us a lot of development time and getting the team off track for something that ultimately didn't pan out for a lot of it. It worked a little bit for gaming for a few years, but then it kind of fizzled out.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's been so many different waves of excitement and despair and ups and downs. Like I think about, obviously, we talked about the mobile transition. That was huge. That was kind of probably the biggest, most memorable thing. There were other waves that I'm sure you remember well, like the Facebook, everyone's going to build stuff inside Facebook. Right, inside. That was the months, I think, nine months. Everybody in Silicon Valley almost stopped working on their own website and started like building on this Facebook API thing.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, with any technology, maybe it gets small enough, it becomes so irrelevant that you don't need it anymore. But I think with the web, we're far from that point. I mean, there's still a lot of people touching.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I mean, I think the web is still important and we still get a lot of new users from there. We get a lot of content from there. I mean, the majority has shifted to app, app in particular. Like a lot of people talk about mobile web, but we're quite app focused. I mean, we still do obviously a lot of mobile web development, and we do sort of desktop web development, and there's a lot of people touching those sites But app does feel like the long term future, I think, several years from now, it's hard to say how much web traffic we'll have, but I think people will be more tuned into just the app.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the iPhone launched, I had a lot of fear actually that, hey, there's a new starting line. And so with the launch of the original Yelp site, there's obviously a lot of risk in that moment. Can you get it to work, chicken and egg? Can you solve that? And then it was working. And so we had a couple years there where we're just cranking and we're getting lots of reviews and people are finding this site really helpful. And then this smartphone thing launches and we're like, oh crap. Like we're back to square one. If we don't nail this in a couple of years, we could start being irrelevant. And it's the classic. Well, you just did say that, you know,”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's still going. I mean, we have like 100 north of 140 million. Was it our 2.0? No. That's terrible. Had some inkling that mobile, especially once the real smartphones launched, particularly the iPhone, we kind of knew that the future was going to go in that direction. Prior to that, we thought mobile was interesting, but it was so rudimentary. It was so stripped down. I don't know if you remember WAP sites. This horrible thing. We actually had one, but it was really a toe in the water at that point, and we weren't excited about it. It wasn't until the iPhone that the light bulb went on and we said mobile is here, we need to start investing in this. And so we were one of the premier apps with the launch of the App Store, when the iPhone launch, we were there, and Apple was somewhat impressed. They featured us in some commercials and gave us a little bit of promotion in the early days. And that was great because I felt like when...”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2.0. We were Web 2.0. Remember that whole phase? It was like to dig cover on Business Week. I remember all that good stuff.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like YOCAL, I guess it was a catchy one. Yeah, and I couldn't buy the domain. It was really frustrating. They wouldn't sell it to me. Good. That was good. And so we were down to the wire. It was two weeks before launch. And so David was in the incubator and was spending some time trying to help us out since we couldn't buy that domain. And he was like, how about this Yelp thing? It's like Yelp, help, Yelp, Yelp pages. And so when we heard it, we're like, that's kind of negative. It's a cry for help. And maybe that's not going to work for us. But there was another person in the incubator who was actually involved in the naming of PayPal, this guy, Scott Bannister, and he just freaked out. He's like, that's the name. That's the name. And he sat down and started working on buying it for us and the rest was kind of history. Wow.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was not me. So in the incubator that Max Lovechin started, MRL Ventures, there was a guy, David. And he was spending some time working on the original concept with us to ask your friends for recommendations. And I had come up with the name Yoke”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, we saw Craigslist was transforming the newspaper industry, carved out the really profitable classifieds, and we started looking around like, what other old media businesses haven't really been transformed by the internet that we might be able to take a shot at. And right underneath our monitors was that big fat yellow pages book. And we're like, why hasn't the yellow pages still exist in 2004? It didn't make sense to us. But we felt like to recreate it on the internet in a new powerful way, we had to have a new idea. We started thinking about, okay, how do you find local businesses? And it led to this word of mouth, like word of mouth is what gets us really excited about going to a new local business. Trust is key. And the old pages fundamentally is just a book of ads. It's all pay to play. And so we thought maybe with the internet, we could transform that.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I got my start really a PayPal. That was kind of my first real adventure. I interviewed with Elon Musk actually at X.com, which was a competitor. Yeah, so Elon hired me, and I actually stuck it out. There was a lot of drama for those that have followed the PayPal history. And rose through the engineering ranks, was an engineering manager, VP of Engineering Ultimately, and then went off to business school for a year. And then when I was back between my first and second year of business school, that's when I started Yelp.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We thought if you could capture word of mouth, bring it online. That's the process we all like to find local businesses anyways. That would be really powerful. But we didn't think people would just sit there writing reviews. And so we created the service that was really about Q&A and launched it. It didn't work out.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was in the product space, but there was nothing really local. Like restaurants, you had kind of the professional critics. City search tacked on consumer reviews, but it was really a lot of Microsoft did that sidewalk and stuff like”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've noticed. So I want to know who's giving you About the history Yeah, I mean, in the very beginning, the original idea was, hey, can you ask friends for recommendations? Is that a way to bring word of mouth online? Because the initial idea that, hey, people are just going to write reviews. We didn't think people would actually do that. They would just sit there writing reviews.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess in Silicon Valley terms, perhaps. I do have gray hair. Right, you do. And when we started Yelp, the VCs told me, well, we couldn't leave you as CEO. We'd have to bring in a professional, you know, a gray-haired executive is what they decided to be that great sort of.”
2015-12-21 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT