Steve Jobs warned Yelp’s CEO not to sell out to Google
Steve Jobs once urged Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman to not go Google.
SFGate published a lengthy profile of Yelps’ co-founder and chief executive today, but one of the more interesting anecdotes concerned the late co-founder of Apple, of course.
According to SFGate:
- Jeremy Stoppelman was on a conference call with venture capitalists when an assistant slipped him a note: “Steve Jobs is on the line.”
- Stoppelman quietly left the room at Yelp headquarters in downtown San Francisco. It was January 2010, and Google wanted to buy Yelp, the online, crowd-sourced review site. On the phone, Jobs urged Stoppelman, who revered the Apple chief as a visionary, to “stay independent and not sell out to Google.” Jobs was not a fan of Google and had accused the search giant of stealing Apple’s smart-phone and tablet technology.
- “At that point, we had already turned down Google,” Stoppelman said. “But Steve liked Yelp and wanted to make sure about Google. It was a moment where I said, ‘This is crazy. What just happened?'”
The CEO further admitted that he received another flooring phone call this spring when his company went public. Apparently, President Barack Obama ringed to congratulate Yelp on all of its successes since founding in 2004.
Yelp’s continuous upswing shows no signs of stopping, either. Senior Vice President of iOS Software Scott Forstall even demoed Yelp on Apple’s new Maps app during the opening keynote at the Worldwide Developers Conference last month. The check-in integration is slated to debut in iOS 6.
So, it appears Jobs may have had ulterior motives when warning Stoppelman about the repercussions of a Google acquisition—surprise, surprise.
