Yelp’s Stoppelman Leads IPO by Snubbing Google, Yahoo Offers
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Jeremy Stoppelman, who watched his seven-year-old company jump as much as 73 percent on its first day of trading today, got to this point by shunning offers that other startups would have found hard to resist.
About two years ago, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Yelp Inc. rejected a $550 million bid by Google Inc. and a Yahoo Inc. overture of $1 billion, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. He also severed an earlier partnership with Google that brought in more users to maintain tighter control of data from Yelp, a social-media service with consumer-generated reviews of businesses.