![]() I always hoped that I would do it, but I also wasn’t sure that it it would all come together. It was a dream to find my way to starting a company. I also grew up around the time when all these big names in computing - Bill Gates, Michael Dell, steve Jobs - they were all in the prime of their careers. In Forbes there was a particular section on entrepreneurship and I’d always read the little vignettes about how someone started a small business. I used to read Fortune and Forbes all the way back in my early teenage years. I was also very early on interested in business and how companies were started. I was always interested from a very early age in computers and software and technology. TIME: Did you always know you wanted to be a startup founder, or did Yelp happen as a surprise or a revelation? But I think each individual has to decide what make the most sense for themselves. That knowledge can be acquired in a variety of ways–it can be acquired in a formal education, it can be acquired on your own. What really matters is the knowledge and whether you can use that to do something important, useful, worthwhile. Just going to college and getting by is not necessarily going to guarantee you anything. The reality is the data is starting to show all degrees are not created equal. I think it’s been misinterpreted in the media because it sounds controversial–like ‘Oh, Peter Thiel says you don’t need school.’ He just means there is this belief that a college degree solves all problems. ![]() I think when Peter Thiel or Max Levchin talk about that school is not necessarily necessary, part of it is to strike a conversation. The idea that people don’t need education is obviously preposterous. I don’t know that everyone falls into that category, I’d say most people probably don’t. There are certain individuals that are extremely precocious and self-driven, and it doesn’t matter whether they had university or not–they’re going to figure out what they need to be successful. Stoppelman: There’s no one-size-fits-all. What’s your view of school? There are a lot of famous Silicon Valley dropouts. TIME: I know before you founded Yelp, you went to business school for a year then dropped out. ![]() When I later went on to start Yelp, I tried to make sure that similarly, we gave people opportunities based on the potential they demonstrated rather than just something like, ‘Oh, they’ve done it before.’” There were a number of people around that organization that were very young but were very high-potential and were given the opportunity to stretch and grow with the company. That team, especially the management team, gave me the opportunity to become the VP of engineering all while I’m in my early-to-mid 20s, which is very unusual I think in corporate America. Even building a consumer Internet site at that time, that was a completely novel idea. We were trying to do things we didn’t necessarily know how to do. So few of us had what would be called preexisting experience. One of the things I took away from that experience was how if you give a really talented person a stretch opportunity, how far they could really take that. Stoppelman: It was a group of really smart individuals. What were the biggest lessons you learned working with those people? TIME: When you were there at PayPal, there were a lot of people there who went on to be incredibly successful. He was telling me right then and there that we were going to take down Visa and MasterCard if everything went our way, and he really seemed to believe it. I’d never met anyone with ambitions like that. I’d never met a 28-year-old successful entrepreneur on his second venture. I found my way to X.com, which was an online bank started by Elon Musk. If you were a software engineer, recruiters were calling constantly, so I just started going out on interviews. The dot-com bubble was still very much under way. Stoppelman: I started interviewing randomly. I figured it was time to start looking for something more exciting. I’d kind of run through all the projects that they had for me, and I didn’t really know how to allocate my time. I just found myself without a whole lot to do after a few weeks. I realized pretty quickly that the team was not super well-managed.
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