Y Combinator sets its sights on D.C. with Luther Lowe
Today, we’re bringing you a conversation from TechCrunch's StrictlyVC event in DC earlier this month, where TechCrunch Editor in Chief & General Manager Connie Loizos sat down with Luther Lowe, who serves as Y Combinator’s Head of Public Policy. Lowe joined the accelerator last fall from Yelp, where he was SVP of Public Policy.
Connie and Luther touched on antitrust efforts to reign in big tech, Y Combinator’s impact, leadership and access to talent, and what competition, policy and regulation look like in the AI era. It’s a super interesting conversation, so press play and listen in!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast.
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Is Google Getting Worse? (Update)
It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us? And is Google Search finally facing a real rival, in the form of A.I.-powered “answer engines”?
SOURCES:Marissa Mayer, co-founder of Sunshine; former C.E.O. of Yahoo! and vice president at Google.
Ryan McDevitt; professor of economics at Duke University.
Tim Hwang, media researcher and author; former Google employee.
Elizabeth Reid, vice president of Search at Google.
Aravind Srinivas, C.E.O. and co-founder of Perplexity.
Jeremy Stoppelman, C.E.O. and co-founder of Yelp.
RESOURCES:“A Fraudster Who Just Can’t Seem to Stop … Selling Eyeglasses,” by David Segal (The New York Times, 2022).
Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, by Tim Hwang (2020).
“Complaint: U.S. and Plaintiff States v. Google LLC,” by the U.S. Department of Justice (2020).
“Fake Online Locksmiths May Be Out to Pick Your Pocket, Too,” by David Segal (The New York Times, 2016).
“‘A’ Business by Any Other Name: Firm Name Choice as a Signal of Firm Quality,” by Ryan C. McDevitt (Journal of Political Economy, 2014).
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, by Steven Levy (2011).
“The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page (Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 1998).
EXTRAS:“Is Dialysis a Test Case of Medicare for All?” by Freakonomics Radio (2021).
“How Big is My Penis? (And Other Things We Ask Google),” by Freakonomics Radio (2017).
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Twitter, Layoffs, and Streaming: Pivot's Q2 Quarterly Review
Kara and Scott are back with a Quarterly Review, to see how our predictions from the past quarter have held up. We'll also get some predictions for the next quarter from Friends of Pivot, including Preet Bharara, host of Stay Tuned with Preet, Jeremy Stoppelman, Co-Founder and CEO of Yelp, Edward Ongweso Jr. of Vice’s Motherboard, and Cecilia Kang of The New York Times.
You can find Preet on Twitter at @PreetBharara, Jeremy at @jeremys, Edward at @bigblackjacobin, and Cecilia at @ceciliakang.
Send us your Listener Mail questions by calling us at 855-51-PIVOT, or via Yappa, at nymag.com/pivot.
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Emergency Podcast: Department of Justice vs. Google with Yelp's Luther Lowe
The U.S. Department of Justice filed suit against Google on Tuesday, alleging the company unlawfully maintained a monopoly in search and search advertising. The antitrust action was the most significant since the DOJ's case against Microsoft, and is sure to send ripples through Silicon Valley where Facebook, Apple, and Amazon will be paying close attention since they might be next.
To talk about what it all means, Yelp's senior vice president of public policy Luther Lowe joined the Big Technology Podcast on extremely short notice. Lowe has been pushing the case against Google forward for years, and his on the ground perspective can help shed light on what's at stake and what comes next.
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How I Built Resilience: Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp
Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman says his leadership team anticipated a "nuclear winter" after the pandemic hit. But as businesses start to re-open, and ad revenues on the site creep back up, Yelp is bringing back furloughed employees and adding Covid-conscious features to its listings. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.
Order the How I Built This book at:
https://smarturl.it/HowIBuiltThisSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman welcomes you to Team Antitrust
Antitrust criticism of big tech companies like Google, Apple, and Amazon have been louder than ever — from the consumers to the tech companies who compete with them. Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman has been vocal for years about the problem with Google’s dominant market share in maps, local search, and reviews.
“I’ve been working on it for over a decade and it’s great to see that more people have jumped on board.” Stoppelman says. “When we started out criticizing Google and highlighting some of their abuses, we got — especially from Silicon Valley — so many eye rolls.”
The Verge’s Nilay Patel and Casey Newton recently caught up with Stoppelman to discuss the evolving view of the media and the public on the tech monopolies, as well as how Yelp is handling their competition and what possible changes can be made with regulation from the government.
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S11:E8 - How to not let imposter syndrome hold you back (Allen Whearry)
In this episode, we’re talking about tackling imposter syndrome and succeeding, with Allen Whearry, software engineer at Yelp. Allen talks about his strategy for teaching himself to code, conquering his self-doubt, and how after applying for job after job, he finally landed a position at Yelp.
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Allen is a self-taught iOS Developer who made the switch from a professional sales career and now sits as a software engineer at Yelp. He believes anyone can learn to program, they just have to put in the time and effort.
Yelp: Jeremy Stoppelman
In 2004, two former Paypal engineers, Jeremy Stoppelman and Russ Simmons, were spit-balling new internet ideas. Out of their brainstorm came a site where you would email your friends asking for local business recommendations. The launch was a flop, but they discovered that people seemed to enjoy writing reviews not just for friends, but for the general public. Fifteen years later, Yelp is a publicly traded company with more than 4,000 employees and over 140 million monthly visitors. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," Liz Bales explains how putting cat food inside plastic mice became her full-time business and why it could revolutionize the way humans feed their cats.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Recode Decode: Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman: Silicon Valley has 'lost its purpose'
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about the phenomenon of techlash and why people are just now "waking up" to Silicon Valley's dark side. Stoppelman's company has feuded for years with its much larger rival Google, which Yelp says has unfairly weighted local search results to its own product. He says the Google of 2004 would laugh at how the company does business today, and praises the new regulations being brought against tech giants by the EU. However, Stoppelman suggests he's not optimistic about U.S. lawmakers taking similar action, even though scrutiny of the big companies seems to have united Democrats and Republicans for once.
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20VC: Why Strategic Investing Is Slow Motion M&A, Why Valuation Is The Hardest Element of M&A & What Determines Between Cash vs Stock Deals with Chad Richard, SVP of Business & Corporate Development @ Yelp
Chad Richard is the Senior Vice President of Business & Corporate Development @ Yelp, where he leads acquisition and investment activity. Yelp is one of the most active in the space having acquired both NoWait and Turnstyle Analytics, plus selling Eat24 to GrubHub for $287.5m, all in the past year. Prior to Yelp, Chad spent six years at Apple as Senior Director of Worldwide Product Marketing focused on Apple's operating systems and internet services. Prior to Apple, he cofounded and was CEO of Simple Star, a photo and video software and services company that was acquired by Roxio. If that was not enough, Chad has also advised the likes of Flipboard, MoveWith and Curbside, just to name a few.
In Today's Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How did Chad make his way from startup founder to leading Apple's M&A charge to today, running M&A with Yelp?
2.) What did the Apple M&A strategy look like when Chad was with the company? Why was Apple so keen to pursue a product focussed M&A strategy? What were Chad's big learnings from that experience with Apple?
3.) How does Chad look to build potential startup pipe with Yelp? What attracts Chad to one startup over another? What does Chad wish that startup founders did and knew more about in the initial relationship building phase?
4.) Yelp also makes strategic investments, how does Chad ease founder and VC concern that a strategic investment is not an acquisition? Does a strategic investment prevent a startup from partnering with other firms? What should founders be aware of when accepting strategic investment?
5.) How does Chad analyse the compensation element? Why does Chad believe that valuing potential acquisitions is the hardest element of the process? How do acquirers determine whether to present a cash vs stock deal? What should founders consider with stock deals between private and public company stock?
Items Mentioned In Today's Show:
Chad's Fave Book: Disneywar
Chad's Most Recent Investment: Turnstyle Analytics
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Chad on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Available in carry-on and check-in sizes, Raden is the case for better, smarter travel. By pairing the lightest and most durable materials with technology, travelers can charge their devices on the go, weigh, and track their cases. Visit Raden.com to use code 20VC at checkout. After purchase, you will receive $25 credit to Uber this Holiday season. If a UK listener, head over to Selfridges.com and/or Selfridges on Oxford St. and farfetch.com to shop Raden today.
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Recode Decode: Luther Lowe, Yelp; Beth Wilkinson, Wilkinson Walsh Eskovitz
Recode's Kara Swisher and SKDK's Hilary Rosen talk about tech, regulation and politics with two special guests: Luther Lowe, the vice president of public policy at Yelp, and Beth Wilkinson, the co-founder of trial law firm Wilkinson Walsh Eskovitz. The group explains how lawyers from Twitter, Facebook and Google found themselves testifying in front of Congress this week and why the politics of the hearings around the 2016 election are so messy and different from what has come before. Lowe and Wilkinson also talk about the other political issues facing Silicon Valley, including antitrust regulation, consumer data privacy and the future of jobs.
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Rebuilding Yelp's Data Pipeline with Justin Cunningham - Episode 5
Summary
Yelp needs to be able to consume and process all of the user interactions that happen in their platform in as close to real-time as possible. To achieve that goal they embarked on a journey to refactor their monolithic architecture to be more modular and modern, and then they open sourced it! In this episode Justin Cunningham joins me to discuss the decisions they made and the lessons they learned in the process, including what worked, what didn’t, and what he would do differently if he was starting over today.
Preamble
Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data infrastructure
When you’re ready to launch your next project you’ll need somewhere to deploy it. Check out Linode at www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss and get a $20 credit to try out their fast and reliable Linux virtual servers for running your data pipelines or trying out the tools you hear about on the show.
Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, read the show notes, and get in touch.
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Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Justin Cunningham about Yelp’s data pipeline
Interview with Justin Cunningham
Introduction
How did you get involved in the area of data engineering?
Can you start by giving an overview of your pipeline and the type of workload that you are optimizing for?
What are some of the dead ends that you experienced while designing and implementing your pipeline?
As you were picking the components for your pipeline, how did you prioritize the build vs buy decisions and what are the pieces that you ended up building in-house?
What are some of the failure modes that you have experienced in the various parts of your pipeline and how have you engineered around them?
What are you using to automate deployment and maintenance of your various components and how do you monitor them for availability and accuracy?
While you were re-architecting your monolithic application into a service oriented architecture and defining the flows of data, how were you able to make the switch while verifying that you were not introducing unintended mutations into the data being produced?
Did you plan to open-source the work that you were doing from the start, or was that decision made after the project was completed? What were some of the challenges associated with making sure that it was properly structured to be amenable to making it public?
What advice would you give to anyone who is starting a brand new project and how would that advice differ for someone who is trying to retrofit a data management architecture onto an existing project?
Keep in touch
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The intro and outro music is from The Hug by The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA
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Recode Decode: Jeremy Stoppelman, Yelp CEO
Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman talks with Kara Swisher about spending a decade at the helm of the local-recommendations site, and the new challenges posed by private companies that can out-raise the public Yelp. He also explains why he thinks quasi-competitor Google has ?lost its mind.? Later on: Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode don virtual reality headsets that are powered by smartphones and talk about the inevitable dystopian future.
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