The Company: Yelp.com is trying to remake the Yellow Pages business and grab a slice of the $92 billion local advertising market. People review everything from their doctors to hot new clubs. It's a go-to site for hip 20-somethings in San Francisco, and is starting to expand to New York, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Los Angeles. It has more than 1 million visitors per month who have posted some 150,000 reviews. But Yelp.com still has to prove its formula works in other cities.
Funding: Yelp raised $1 million from PayPal founder Max Levchin in 2003, and $5 million from Bessemer Partners in 2005.
Background Check: Simmons graduated from the prestigious Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy at 16 and was the first engineer Levchin hired. Stoppelman, also from PayPal, is the token Harvard MBA drop-out of the bunch. He would swipe his father's business magazines, and invest his allowance in hot stocks -- usually tech companies.
http://jeremy.stoppelman.com/
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