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Key People

Management

Jeremy Stoppelman, Co-founder and CEO

Jeremy is the CEO of Yelp. He co-founded Yelp Inc. in July 2004 with former colleague and friend Russel Simmons.

Prior to Yelp, Jeremy was the VP of engineering at PayPal. He left PayPal in the summer of 2003 to attend the Harvard Business School. Upon completing his first year at HBS, Jeremy joined an incubator started by Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal) for a summer internship. It was there that he was reunited with his old colleague Russel Simmons and the two teamed up to create a vibrant community around local information.

Jeremy holds a B.S. in computer engineering from the University of Illinois.

Russel Simmons, Co-founder and CTO

Russ co-founded Yelp Inc. in July 2004 with former colleague and friend Jeremy Stoppelman.

Prior to Yelp, Russ was one of the early employees and the lead software architect at PayPal. He led a team of top engineers on critical projects related to security, scalability, stability, and internationalization as the company scaled rapidly. Following his time at PayPal, Russ joined Max Levchin's (co-founder of PayPal) incubator, where he teamed up with Jeremy.

Russ holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois.

Geoff Donaker, COO

Geoff joined the team in November 2005.

Prior to Yelp, Geoff spent five years building Web communities at eBay, most recently as director of international category management and previously as director of collectibles. His previous experience includes business development and marketing management roles at Excite@Home, Voter.com, Classifieds2000 and Mercer Management Consulting.

Geoff has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

Brandon Bickford, engineering

No bio available. Add a bio.

Nish Nadaraja, Director of Marketing

No bio available. Add a bio.

Board of Directors

Jeremy Stoppelman

View bio above.

Max Levchin

Max is the visionary behind Slide, the largest social software company in the world. He is also renowned as the co-founder of PayPal, an expert in combating online fraud and one of the hardest working entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Before starting Slide, he incubated several other start-ups, including Yelp, where he currently sits as Chairman of the Board. Max started PayPal in 1998, immediately after graduating from college, and sold it four years later to eBay for more than $1.5 billion at the age of 26. Originally from Kiev, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union), Max moved to Chicago at the age of 16 and later received his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Max sits on the board of several other companies and trains for triathlons when he's not obsessing over Slide's business.

Peter Fenton

Peter Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006 after spending seven years as a partner with Accel Partners, where his investment interests included software, digital media, and technology enabled services.

Prior to joining the venture capital community, he spent several years working with Silicon Valley software and high-technology companies as an entrepreneur and strategy consultant. He was an early employee at Virage, a multimedia information retrieval company that went public on the NASDAQ in 2000. Peter also worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company in San Francisco, where he advised high-technology businesses in Silicon Valley on their product and business strategies. His investments include: Aptana, Apexon, Coremetrics, Hyperic, JBoss, Mendocino Software, Oak Pacific Interactive, Reactivity, Terracotta, Wily Technology, Xensource, and Zimbra.

Fenton has MBA from Stanford Business School, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar; and a BA from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Keith Rabois

Keith is Vice President, Strategy & Business Development at Slide, where he is responsible for Slide's corporate strategy and partnerships. Under his leadership, Slide has become the leading application developer on Facebook with more active users than any other developer. Before joining Slide, Keith served as Vice President of Business & Corporate Development at LinkedIn, where he was responsible for generating new revenue streams. Prior to LinkedIn, Keith served as Executive Vice President at PayPal, directing the company's competitive strategy and business development initiatives. After leaving PayPal, Keith was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Clarium Capital Management, the global hedge fund lead by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Keith currently serves on the Board of Directors of Yelp, Vendio, Xoom and FanIQ. He is also an early investor in YouTube and several other high profile early stage start-ups. Keith holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Stanford University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Jeremy Levine

Mr. Levine focuses primarily on software and Internet investments for Bessemer. Prior to joining BVP in 2001, Jeremy was Vice President of Operations at Dash, an Internet software publisher. Jeremy joined Dash from AEA Investors, a private equity firm with an expertise in leveraged and management buyouts, where he specialized in consumer products and light industrials in the U.S. and in Europe. Earlier, he was a management consultant with McKinsey and Company, helping Fortune 500 financial services and consumer products companies address challenges in strategy and technology. Jeremy graduated from Duke University with a B.S. in Computer Science and Economics.

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