Yelp's early team at 650 Mission Street had to separate community management from sales to protect review integrity as the company scaled. The company grew from $1M to $750M+ in revenue by managing the tension between community trust and sales incentives across different markets.
Chapters
So it sounds like you had quite a bit of interface, you know, with not only product but kind of marketing and even, you know, probably customer support, you know, internally. So how was that kind of org structure? And, you know, maybe how did that kind of change as you scaled up at Yelp?
You know, one of the advantages of it being a 20-person company is we were all on the same floor, right? And so everyone was just there. You know, we were at 650 Mission Street, you know, in one building. And, you know, you can imagine as a salesperson making cold calls into businesses and having Jeremy, right next to you, the CEO, is pretty intimidating, but you learned how to do it and you got to know everyone. We got to see that market-by-market approach play out. It was such a small company that when we had the parties in San Francisco, the community manager parties, everyone would go. I mean, it was like a work event. I'd be handing out drinks and chatting with elite members and getting them food. That was just something that everyone did, right? And so it was just a part of the job. It was a small company. Of course, over time, you know, that changed. I think particularly even in the early days, we had to segment out the sales team at Yelp from the user-facing team because there was this always this concern around the reviews, right, and the ad product, and that somehow those 2 things would get conflated. And in order to maintain integrity, the sales team couldn't even talk to the customer support team. It was like a separation of church and state. So that was something that we had to put in place pretty early on at Yelp to make sure that the businesses didn't think you could pay to play on the review side. And there's still, you know, misinformation about that, but that was a key part of the org structure. But, you know, I think ultimately probably the best insight that I can give you around the org structure here is we had the community management team completely focused on the community. Their job was to grow the community, grow the center of the bullseye, grow the user base, grow the demand side, period. They were not focused on the revenue side at all. If they would've said, hmm, maybe we should start to get our community to write more reviews for auto repair shops, I don't think the community would've really liked that. It wouldn't have attracted the right members. Maybe it would've helped from a revenue perspective in the short term, but it wasn't the right long-term play. So I think, you know, having the community management team focus on the users, focus on the demand side, and then having the sales team wholly focused on the supply side and converting that into paid advertising accounts was a key part of the org structure and not, you know, kind of conflating the metrics of each group. So, you know, ultimately became a huge company. We had a huge marketing team. A huge sales team. I mean, at one point there was probably almost 2,000 sales reps across the United States. So it was a huge undertaking. But yeah, some insights there on the org structure. And it was, it was a great run and real thankful to be there in the early days when I got to kind of have insights into the whole business just through osmosis.
