Yelp Announces Jason Fennell as Head of Engineering

After Decade with Company, SVP Michael Stoppelman to Pursue Personal Initiatives

SAN FRANCISCO--()--Yelp Inc. (NYSE: YELP), the company that connects consumers with great local businesses, announced today that longtime senior engineering manager Jason Fennell has been appointed senior vice president and will lead the company’s engineering efforts. After more than a decade with Yelp, current SVP of Engineering Michael Stoppelman will leave the company in the coming months to pursue personal interests and initiatives.

Fennell joined Yelp in 2008 as an engineer responsible for search and data mining. He progressed through increasingly senior roles and was most recently Vice President of Engineering for Data Mining, with more than 150 reports spanning Yelp’s algorithmically focused teams as well as partnerships, data infrastructure and parts of the business owner product. He has also successfully led engineering recruiting for several years. Fennell holds a joint Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, where he is also a member of the Board of Trustees.

“During his more than eight years at Yelp, Jason has demonstrated both subject matter expertise and strong leadership skills,” said Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman. “He has also overseen the recruitment of many of our current engineering team members. Given this and the large portion of the engineering team he already manages, Jason is an obvious choice to head our engineering efforts going forward. I’m confident he will do a great job helping the team accomplish the important objectives we’ve put in place for 2017 and beyond.”

“I would like to thank Michael for his decade of service to Yelp. He grew our engineering team more than 10x, put in place the people structure and technology architecture we rely on today, and developed processes that steer the team’s planning and execution. Yelp Engineering has truly become a force to be reckoned with and the whole company wishes Michael well,” Stoppelman continued.

“I’m thrilled at the opportunity to lead Yelp’s engineering efforts,” said Fennell. “Michael has built up a world-class engineering organization and I’m looking forward to taking the helm.”

“I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished so far and Yelp’s engineering team has never been in a better place,” said Michael Stoppelman. “Jason is a longtime Yelp leader who has earned the deep respect of the entire team. I look forward to watching his success as Yelp embarks on the next stage of its growth.”

About Yelp

Yelp Inc. (http://www.yelp.com) connects people with great local businesses. Yelp was founded in San Francisco in July 2004. Since then, Yelp has taken root in major metros in more than 30 countries. Approximately 24 million unique devices1 accessed Yelp via the Yelp app, approximately 73 million unique visitors visited Yelp via desktop computer2 and approximately 65 million unique visitors visited Yelp via mobile website3 on a monthly average basis during the fourth quarter of 2016. By the end of the same quarter, Yelpers had written approximately 121 million rich, local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists.

1 Calculated as the number of unique devices accessing the app on a monthly average basis over a given three-month period, according to internal Yelp logs.

2 Calculated as the number of “users,” as measured by Google Analytics, accessing Yelp via desktop computer on a monthly average basis over a given three-month period.

3 Calculated as the number of “users,” as measured by Google Analytics, accessing Yelp via the mobile website on a monthly average basis over a given three-month period.

Contacts

Public Relations Contact Information
Vince Sollitto, Shannon Eis
press@yelp.com
or
Investor Relations Contact Information
Ron Clark, Allie Dalglish
ir@yelp.com

Contacts

Public Relations Contact Information
Vince Sollitto, Shannon Eis
press@yelp.com
or
Investor Relations Contact Information
Ron Clark, Allie Dalglish
ir@yelp.com