Timing can be everything. Especially in the high-speed world of technological startups. Working at Google before it got gigantic, then in on the ground floor at Yelp, Michael Stoppelman (S’03) has been in the right place at some very opportune times.
From a childhood in Great Falls, Virginia, to a Midwestern stop at Purdue, the young man headed farther west after graduation, soon landing in San Francisco as part of the Silicon Valley boom. “I was at Google at a unique time before they went public, right around the 1,000-employee mark,” he says. “When I left after three and a half years they had 15,000 employees.”
He’s been part of the Yelp story since its genesis, when Jeremy Stoppelman, his older brother, envisioned an Internet version of the Yellow Pages with Russel Simmons, a PayPal pal. The secret to their success: connecting people with businesses through online reviews. Yelp has expanded exponentially since its 2004 founding, turning heads with a reported $30 million in revenues by 2010, migrating into Asian and European markets, and going public itself in 2012. What’s more, the company is now part of the pop culture lexicon, last year even lampooned in a South Park episode called “You’re Not Yelping.”
For the younger Stoppelman, who joined Yelp in 2007 as one of six software engineers, the company’s growth is nothing short of mind-boggling. “That’s the dream, to have a product that you think is a good idea turn into something culturally mainstream,” he says. “It’s incredible to see. When you’re in the midst of building it brick by brick, you don’t see the height of what you’re building.”
As for his time among the red brick buildings of Purdue, the one-time electrical and computer engineering student who made the jump to computer science says his Boilermaker days prepared him for California’s cutting edge. “The folks I was exposed to at Purdue really raised the bar for me,” says Stoppelman, now Yelp’s senior vice president of engineering. “My Purdue friends remain my friends today, and the university provides a strong, hard-working base of students to pull from.”
“The folks I was exposed to at Purdue really raised the bar for me. My Purdue friends remain my friends today, and the university provides a strong, hard-working base of students to pull from.”
—Michael Stoppleman
Now more than a dozen years embedded into a work culture characterized by highly talented people who can quickly mine ideas for gold, Stoppelman says his electives were as important as computer science courses. “Classes like psychology and languages end up being super valuable when you work on bigger teams and become a manager.”
In these typical day-to-days, Stoppelman meets with management teams on a variety of new products, such as Yelp SeatMe, an online reservation service, and Yelp Eat24, a food delivery service. Continuously redefining markets is a philosophy he likens to the “speed of understanding a revolution.”
A revolution perhaps not without critics. But that comes with expanded territory. “With any disruptive technology, someone finds something wrong with your product,” Stoppelman says. “When people started using lightbulbs, the candlemakers probably complained pretty loudly. We’re reforming a market that hasn’t been challenged in 100 years, since the Yellow Pages started. Someone is going to complain. That’s life. That’s what America is all about.”