You want experimentation. Every once in awhile, you stumble upon something that blows your mind.
On mobile, what are the core apps? It's basically messaging, mapping and review data.
About every year or two, there is a moment of truth where there's some new development in the marketplace, some new technology, some sort of existential crisis. You just have to be vigilant about looking out for those moments.
If somebody writes a review of a dry cleaner, that piece of content is not wildly viral. It's not like a viral video that can spread across the world in a matter of minutes, so as a result, each market is almost an island unto itself.
There's been resistance to every new technology that's ever been introduced. When books came out hundreds of years ago, there were complaints that it would destroy the oral tradition. Some of those fears were justified, but it didn't stop the rise of the written word. And books have proven to be incredibly useful.
One of the challenges of buying local advertising is, how do you know if it worked? How do you know if it's got value? We're moving toward an e-commerce experience for local, an Amazon-like experience for local.
I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.
There's simply anger over the accountability that Yelp brings and also this feeling of powerlessness because so much power is now being put in the hands of the consumer. But the important thing that gets lost with some of these business owners who are very upset with us is it's the whole picture that counts.
Focusing on that one review you feel is unfair misses the value, which is the whole symphony of opinions you get on your page.
There are so many businesses that are succeeding on Yelp that don't pay us a dollar, and we're really excited about that.
I don't feel necessarily it's winner-take-all across the globe, where there has to be one local guide for the entire world. We'll certainly do as many of these markets as we can.
I think my dad did legal work for someone who had a Packard Bell 8088, and they couldn't pay him, so they gave him a computer. I was initially not allowed to touch it, but that didn't last long. I started tinkering with it, and there were many times I screwed up the computer.
As a kid, I harbored this fantasy of starting a company. I looked at the entrepreneur column in Forbes. I looked at it every month and thought, 'I want to be that guy.'
Maintaining the trust of the consumer is critical to our business. We live and breathe only one thing, which is wanting to connect consumers with great local businesses, and I don't feel we can do that if we don't have effective ways to prevent gaming of the system.
There is this cat and mouse game that plays out over time where our team comes up with new and interesting ideas to identify content that we shouldn't recommend, and over time people are constantly probing that, trying to figure out how can they get around that and get a better reputation on Yelp.
Yelp is in a very nice spot: local data, and especially review data, is one of the killer apps on mobile phones.
Consumers are empowered by Yelp and tools like it: before, when they had a bad experience, they didn't have much recourse. They could fume, but often nothing else other than tell their friends.
Where folks like Google have fallen down is in just putting a little review box up, then closing their eyes and letting the algorithm take care of itself. Yelp is a technology company, but also a company that understands how people want to connect with one another.
A lot of what Groupon is generating is demand for something people didn't know they wanted.
Yelp has been in this business since it really became something worth thinking about in 2004, when the transition started happening from the world of the Yellow Pages to the world of searching online for local information.
