Jeremy Stoppelman

Jeremy Stoppelman (born November 10, 1977) is an American business executive. He is the CEO of Yelp, which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1999. After briefly working for @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the VP of Engineering after the company was renamed PayPal. Stoppelman left PayPal to attend Harvard Business School. During a summer internship at MRL Ventures, he and others came up with the idea for Yelp Inc. He turned down an acquisition offer by Google and took the company public in 2012.

Early life Stoppelman was born in Arlington, Virginia, in 1977. His mother, Lynn, was an English teacher, and his father, John, was a securities lawyer. Stoppelman is Jewish. He attended Langley High School and a Reform temple as a child and had a bar mitzvah. As a child Stoppelman had an interest in computers and business He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering in 1999. After graduating he took a job with @Home Network.

Stoppelman left PayPal after its 2003 acquisition by eBay and attended Harvard Business School for one year. During Stoppelman's school break and had a hard time finding recommendations for a local doctor. He and former PayPal colleague, Russel Simmons, who was also working at MRL Ventures, Under Stoppelman's leadership, Yelp grew to a market capitalization of $4 billion and hosted 138 million user reviews. It has also come under significant scrutiny for its business practices, which have been called exploitative.

Steve Jobs called Stoppelman in January 2010 in an effort to persuade him to turn down an acquisition offer by Google and in March 2012 Stoppelman rang the bell for the New York Stock Exchange after Yelp went public.

Stoppelman has a hands-on management style and sits at a desk among his employees. In 2016, an open letter on Medium to Stoppelman by a San Francisco employee of Yelp subsidiary Eat24, Talia Jane, went viral, describing how she and her coworkers struggled on their wages to afford groceries or winter heating in the Bay Area. She was immediately fired, though Stoppelman said this was not due to the letter. Yelp increased wages and benefits for low-level employees two months later.

In June 2022, following the COVID-19 pandemic, Stoppleman praised fully remote work, eliminating mandatory time in the office, and announced plans to close 450,000 square feet of office space in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Chicago.

Personal Stoppelman is a "voracious" non-fiction reader, and his brother Michael previously worked at Yelp as Senior Vice President of Engineering. For example, he supports the YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement. He lobbied other tech executives to join him in encouraging local governments to build more housing near universities.

Stoppelman advocates for more aggressive enforcement of antitrust regulations against Google and other technology companies. He accuses Google of having a monopoly in digital maps, online search engines, and reviews. He is also one of the few male CEOs of a public company to be a public advocate for reproductive rights.