Jeremy Stoppelman
Harvard Business School · Yelp
A Flu Led Him to Build the World's Biggest Review Platform
24 March 2026
Jeremy Stoppelman got the flu while attending Harvard Business School in 2004 and was frustrated by how hard it was to find a good doctor online. Existing review sites were useless — full of spam and outdated information.
Building Trust Through Real Reviews
With co-founder Russel Simmons, Stoppelman built Yelp to collect authentic, detailed reviews from real people. The key innovation was making reviewing social — users had profiles, friends, and community status.
Local Business Revolution
Yelp became the go-to platform for finding restaurants, doctors, plumbers, and every other local business. By making reviews social and gamified, they solved the cold-start problem that killed other review sites.
244 Million Reviews
Yelp went public in 2012 and now hosts over 244 million reviews. The platform fundamentally changed how people discover local businesses. Stoppelman's flu turned out to be a billion-dollar moment of frustration.
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