Starting a company, your success is going to be very dependent on how you adapt. You're going to make decisions, you're going to make bets; most of them are going to turn out to be wrong.
On mobile, what are the core apps? It's basically messaging, mapping and review data.
The entrepreneurs that really make it are the ones that start with an idea but are ready to change it at a moment's notice.
Everyone is panicked about the transition to mobile. I don't lose any sleep whatsoever.
Yelp is in a very nice spot: local data, and especially review data, is one of the killer apps on mobile phones.
I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there's a financial incentive.
Choose something you are passionate about - or a pain point that has affected you and that you feel really needs to be changed.
In early 2008, it was confirmed that there would be an opportunity to build applications for the iPhone. We were fortunate enough to make the right call on that: to bet early, to put resources into it and have a pretty good application in the store at the moment when it opened.
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.
Maintaining the trust of the consumer is critical to our business
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.
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.
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.
In the very beginning, Yelp started as a service where we really didn't think people would write reviews for fun. The whole concept of user-generated content was pretty nascent in 2004.
There are so many businesses that are succeeding on Yelp that don't pay us a dollar, and we're really excited about that.
When Yelp first took off, our rankings on Google would fluctuate wildly.
A lot of what Groupon is generating is demand for something people didn't know they wanted.
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.
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.
The biggest thing is to create a product that consumers find useful. As more and more people like something, it becomes harder and harder to have a conspiracy theory about it.
Theres 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 its the whole picture that counts.
You have to be very nimble and very open minded. Your success is going to be very dependent on how your adapt.
