Companies: Yelp

I co-founded the incubator, MRL Ventures, lead by Paypal founder, Max Levchin.

As an entrepreneur in residence, I lead the project which became Yelp, identifying the market, defining the product opportunity and doing the initial UX designs. Yelp IPO’ed in 2012.

At MRL I was an Entrepreneur In Residence responsible for looking for ideas to do with ‘local’.

Having researched the space I realized that the Yellow Pages advertising market was worth more than Google’s entire ad market and that it would be of strategic importance. With Alec Matusis I came up with the idea for a service based on user generated reviews of businesses.

Jeremy Stoppelman later joined MRL and I worked with him of on designing a business review site, based on his idea of the principal flow being based on emailing friends. This product became Yelp and I did the UX for Yelp with Jeremy.

I also worked on the branding, choosing the name Yelp as a contraction of Yellow Pages that alluded to people shouting their opinions.