I've been through a couple of mergers - they're not that fun. And it's easy to lose your focus on this grandiose mission you established for yourself as an independent company.

You want experimentation. Every once in awhile, you stumble upon something that blows your mind.

As a kid, I harbored this fantasy of starting a company. I looked at the entrepreneur column in Forbes. I looked at it every month and thought, 'I want to be that guy.'

In the very beginning, Yelp started as a service where we really didn't think people would write reviews for fun. The whole concept of user-generated content was pretty nascent in 2004.

I think by paying attention to the feedback that you get on Yelp, you can very quickly integrate it into your business... The really savvy folks out there, they don't necessarily take anything negative personally, but use it as constructive feedback and adjust their business.

Where folks like Google have fallen down is in just putting a little review box up, then closing their eyes and letting the algorithm take care of itself. Yelp is a technology company, but also a company that understands how people want to connect with one another.