Jeremy Stoppelman (born November 10, 1977) is an American entrepreneur. He is the CEO of Yelp, Inc., which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman earned a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois in 1999. After a short time working at @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the vice president of engineering at the company that became known as 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 rejected an acquisition offer from Google.
After four months working at @Home Network, Stoppelman accepted a position as an engineer at X.com, which later became PayPal. It was there that he met entrepreneur Max Levchin, who later became an investor in Stoppelman’s company, Yelp Inc.
Stoppelman left PayPal after it was acquired by eBay in 2003 and attended Harvard Business School for one year. During the holidays, Levchin convinced Stoppelman to do an internship at the firm MRL Ventures.
In the summer of 2004, Jeremy Stoppelman caught the flu and had difficulty finding recommendations for a local doctor. Along with a former PayPal colleague, Russel Simmons, who was also working at MRL Ventures, they began brainstorming how to create an online community where users could share recommendations for local services. Stoppelman and Simmons pitched the idea to Levchin, who provided $1 million in seed funding. Under Stoppelman’s leadership, Yelp grew to a market capitalization of $4 billion with 138 million user reviews.