That image there? That beautiful, glorious, professional headshot? I got it straight off Yelp’s Board of Directors page. The file name? I knew you’d be curious. The file name is jeremy.jpg and that is absolutely true and perfect.

Who is this man and is he only turning me on?

I’ll take the second question first and say NO, I’m burning up just as much as you are. I mean look at those honey-brown eyes, if you dare. Maybe don’t, you’ve got reading to do.

SO.

Jeremy Stoppelman, as you know from this post’s title is the current Yelp CEO, and is also the co-founder.

You want some history? Okay, I’ll start with what warms my Midwestern heart first, that young Mr. Stoppelman attended the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they may not have prominent sports, but they do have strong computer sciences.

Now we get to the part of history where we learn something we maybe wish we hadn’t; don’t worry, it won’t tarnish your image of our golden boy, Jeremy. Not long after undergrad, Jeremy began working at X.com, an online bank that was later renamed PayPal (yay), which was co-founded by Elon Musk (ohhh).

After PayPal was acquired by eBay, Stoppelman left and attended Harvard Business School. Then, in the summer of 2004, our shining child got the flu and lamented to his former PayPal colleague, Russel Simmons how difficult it was to find a good doctor.

Thus the idea for sharing online recommendations for services and providers was born. Here is a bit more on the founding process.

Need a hit of lovability?

We’d like to think that this is how Jeremy smiled when he this said of Google Reviews:

Google’s reviews... It is kind of comical that they call theirs reviews! Most, probably like 60% or 70%, of their reviews are actually ratings with no text. But they have to compete against us, so they’re generous with what they call a review.

Scorched. Burned. Fried.

Need another reason to like the man?

A blog post, by the man himself, written June 23, 2022 is titled The Future of Work is Remote. Need I go on?

No return date was set for Yelp employees, instead Yelp used a remote-first system, making offices available to those who desired them. An unsurprising 86% preferred total remote work, and so Yelp closed their “most consistently underutilized offices on July 29, in New York, Chicago and Washington D.C.”

Casual, collected, that’s our CEO.

And he uses Yelp, too! He’s just like us!

Yes. It is now your and my mission to find this profile page and see what lovely things this man is putting in his lovely mouth.

This was a different sort of blog, huh? Yeahhh. It’s the end of December, this is not the time for serious research or journalism to take place. But this was fun!