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Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference

Sep 7, 2023

Moderator

All right, I think I know everyone's moving from room to room, but we're gonna get started on our, our next session here. So it's, it's my pleasure to have the team from Yelp here. We've got Jeremy Stoppelman, co-founder and CEO, David Schwarzbach, CFO. Before we get started, David, I know you've got a bit of a disclosure statement to read, so why don't I throw it over to you first?

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

All right. Excellent, Eric, thanks for having us. We'll be making some forward-looking statements during the conversation today that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our SEC filings for more information on the risk factors that may affect our results.

Moderator

Here we go. Okay. Jeremy, let's start with you. The company's been on a journey. We've been through the pandemic, the post-pandemic. You have a lot of different initiatives you're putting in place, to sort of align the platform for the longer term. Why don't you bring us up to speed over the evolution in the last couple of years, and how you're thinking about the future of, of Yelp?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah. I mean, my thanks for the introduction, it's great to be here. I think my journey is now almost 20 years old. And so it's been quite the ride, quite the roller coaster. We started here in San Francisco, grew city by city, and in 2018 began essentially a re-acceleration and a rethinking of our model. You know, we started leaning into things like multi-location, self-serve, things that we create additional leverage, really catering to our advertiser base by driving more value. And that plan really started to work for us. You know, 2019, things were looking good. 2020 got off to an incredible start. Like many businesses, it was an incredible start. You know, we were right in the bull's-eye of the pandemic, so that did impact us.

But what it allowed us to do was to take this strategy that we had built, you know, kind of in the 2016, 2017, 2018 timeframe, and accelerate our plans to really reinvent the business for the future and for the long term. And we're now celebrating our Q9 of consecutive double-digit revenue growth. And, you know, the plan's really been working. I think even in a challenging macro, it's very clear that advertisers are finding a lot of value. Consumers, of course, continuing to get great value. I think in July, there was 82 million, you know, consumers, according to Comscore, on Yelp.

They're, you know, affluent, really a great demographic, and if you, if you look at the age groups, it's a third, a third, a third, sort of younger side, a third, middle-aged, a third, older, a third. It's a very attractive group for advertisers, and, it's, you know, been going really well. We had a great Q2, very proud of our growth there.

Moderator

Okay, so there's a lot to talk about with respect to the things inside your control and your building. But as you referenced, we do live, and it's probably been one of the two main topics here at the conference the last three days, in a volatile macro environment. There's been ups and downs and puts and takes around different pockets of the advertising world. What's your current view coming out of Q2 about what you're seeing for the broader advertising macro environment and how it's impacting your business?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

I mean, the takeaway for Yelp is, you know, we have a really resilient advertising base, and it seems that our advertisers are really leaning into the value. I think you could say, "Well, why is that?" I think the people, the consumers that are coming to Yelp are coming to transact ultimately.

Moderator

Yeah.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

And so it's a down-funnel audience. It's an audience that is engaging with advertisers in a way where oftentimes that advertiser can find out, Did I get ROI? Did I get value? Did a lead come in through Request a Quote? And so there has been what appears to be a flight to quality. People want lower-risk investments on the advertising side. I think Yelp clearly represents that to a large part of our advertiser base, and that reflects in the performance that we saw in Q2.

Moderator

Maybe sticking with that theme of where your advertiser base is today and where you'd like to get it longer term, how do you think about the mix in the business between larger advertisers and SMBs, dollars that are brand in nature versus direct response or DR in nature, and how to strike the right balance of building scale on the advertiser side?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, I mean, from a sales perspective, we're selling essentially the same thing largely to all of our advertisers. So you do have different senses of scale. So an enterprise or multi-location advertiser might be going across hundreds or thousands of locations, but ultimately, they're buying the same thing that we're selling to SMBs, which is, you know, largely search advertising. So you have a consumer, they're looking for a plumber, or they're looking for a restaurant, or they're looking for a yoga studio, and then they're seeing ads against those results. And that person is at that moment of making a purchase decision, finding a new business, and that's proving to be really valuable for advertisers.

You know, whether it's enterprise-level customers or whether it's SMB customers, they're looking to stay busy in this, you know, challenging macro environment, and they're finding ROI on Yelp, which I think shows up in our growth. You know, looking across the business, multi-location grew by 15% in Q2. I think that reflects the power of what we're providing in terms of advertising. We also have, for those multi-location customers, a lot of attribution solutions-

Moderator

Yeah

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

... be it a third party, or we also have a lot of first-party data. Consumers really trust us. They're looking as they're out and about in the city, and so often we have location information. We know where that user, or that consumer surfaced, and that's really valuable to our enterprise customers to know that people actually—they didn't just see the ad, but did they come in, and ultimately, did they drive additional revenue?

Moderator

Got it. Okay. I wanna stick with that theme for just one minute, this idea of what you've built on self-serve and multi-location. From the outside in, the way we do our work, it's been interesting to see it grow as a percentage of the mix, see broader adoption by advertisers. Where can this go? What can it do for the platform, as you think, across a multi-year view of bringing in a wider array of advertisers, a different level of budget? How should we be thinking about it as a driver of the business?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, multi-location self-serve represent an incredible opportunity for leverage and have represented an opportunity for leverage. And that's frankly why we leaned in, you know, starting really in 2018, and we've seen, you know, continued progress there. And in fact, 51% of revenue was driven from multi-location and self-serve, which, you know, is a great milestone, majority of our revenue, and we don't see that slowing down. We still see a considerable opportunity to keep driving additional multi-location sales, as well as improving our self-serve flows, improving, you know, the advertising that helps fuel what's going on in self-serve. So, there's a lot of runway in that domain.

Moderator

Okay. Then just more broadly, when you think about elements of driving your PAL count and how having more opportunities for advertising can be a driver of that, maybe just talk a little bit about some of the variables you're the most focused on about seeing some of that tailwind effect building in the business.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different aspects that we focus on in the business. You know, there's the consumer side, sort of how many users are on the platform. There's the contribution side. We've seen healthy growth in terms of reviews on the advertiser side. Certainly, there's the number of paying advertisers, but then there's also, like, how much budget is flowing through the system? What's the average CPCs, or what are the CPCs that they're paying category by category? There's things you know, that are more underlying, like what is the quality of those clicks? That's something that's a little bit harder to discern, but it's something that we actually do our best to focus on because, you know, it is possible to chose the number of clicks, but ultimately-

Moderator

Right

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

If the advertiser isn't feeling it in their business, they're going to not retain well. And so, at the end of the day, what we're really trying to do is match consumers as efficiently as we can to our advertisers and deliver value for those advertisers, while delivering a great experience for consumers.

Moderator

Understood. You talked a little bit earlier in one of your answers about the strengths you're seeing in users and engagement. Talk a little bit about how we should be thinking about the opportunity for rising utility out of your user base over time, and how different levels of services that you offer that consumers can take advantage of on the site and the app can be capitalized in terms of both driving the user count, but also driving higher levels of engagement over the long term.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, I think one of the things that is really special about Yelp is its incredibly horizontal nature. And that gives us a license to participate in various aspects of that consumer's life. And so, you know, maybe tonight they're looking for a restaurant, next week, they're looking for a plumber. That's a really unique place to be. And that gives us the opportunity to really build a strong consumer brand. I think that's been some of the key to our success. Why has Yelp had 20 years of durability now? Why is it a culturally relevant big brand? It's because people find daily utility, weekly utility, monthly utility in Yelp, and then every once in a while, they turn to us for something like a services request or home services, which grew 25%-

Moderator

Yeah

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

... year-over-year. Has been, you know, pretty incredible growth rate there. You know, clearly, Yelp taking share. And where is that coming through? That's coming through new products or newer products like Request a Quote, where we've really built out that experience over the last several years, and we continue to have an incredible opportunity to elevate, you know, the home services experience in particular.

Moderator

Okay. Sticking with that theme, though, you have talked about shifting from a sales-led strategy to a product-led strategy. Talk a little bit about that evolution and how you think about aligning investments from one strategy to another and what it means?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Mm-hmm

Moderator

... for growth longer term.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, I think going back to the beginning of the conversation, where we're laying out the earliest days of Yelp, we were growing city by city, but we were also driving revenue by an ever-increasing local sales force.

Moderator

Yeah.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

And the microeconomics of that really worked for us at the time. The ad tech stack was pretty, pretty weak at the time, but delivered enough value to really build something, you know, significant, and that took us all the way through IPO. It took us all the way to maybe 2015, 2016 timeframe, but really began to run out of gas. Like, it was just a too big of a scale, was starting to get really inefficient. And so that's when we really had to focus on: How do we rebuild this economic engine to be more efficient, to generate healthier margins, and to allow us to scale without just adding ever more people to the mix? And, you know, fortunately, that's where we wake up today. It's been a really successful transition.

We now, you know, have 51% of our revenue coming from these more efficient channels, and we're not done.

Moderator

Yeah

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

... there's still plenty of opportunity to drive more self-serve. I think it's important to remember, too, the context that we were living in in 2004, 2005. Like most local advertisers, we're buying Yellow Pages-

Moderator

Right

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

... we're getting calls from the local newspaper. You know, it was a totally different time. And self-serve, yes, it was on the horizon, and we did have sort of a modicum of a self-serve experience, but a lot has transpired between sort of the early days and now, and customers really expect a highly performant ad system, you know, really good targeting so that the leads are relevant. And that's something that we've been working hard to deliver, and I think, you know, it's starting to show up in the results.

Moderator

Okay. We talked a little bit about macro in the front. The other dominant theme at this conference has been artificial intelligence. It's pervaded through pretty much every conversation. Most companies I'm talking to are referencing the ways in which artificial intelligence, generative AI, machine learning, can improve their outward-facing products into their business environment, but also ways in which making investments to drive greater levels of efficiencies and process internally. Talk a little bit about what you see in the landscape. Obviously, you've been around technology shifts in Silicon Valley your whole career.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Mm-hmm

Moderator

... and this is another seismic one when you talk to a lot of people in this part of the world. How you're thinking about the technology shift, aligning it with investments, and what it can do both externally and internally for your company?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah. Thanks for the question. I would say, you know, LLMs is... I'm a bit of a kid in a candy store. I see low-hanging fruit everywhere. You know, things that would've been very difficult, if not impossible, to do in terms of manipulating all of our great trusted data... are suddenly, like, at our fingertips. You can tap into it very simply with an API. We've already booked, you know, some of our first wins with LLMs, and I would say machine learning and AI, in general, are not new to Yelp. We've been working on it for at least a decade. You know, as ML really became a powerful tool, we stood up an internal initiative and had, you know, a fairly large team that was pushing it into all aspects of our business. With LLMs, we're doing the same.

You know, we have an internal working group that's identifying and prioritizing all the areas where we can find wins, especially the low-hanging fruit, and get them implemented as quickly as possible. And it's not just limited to the hardcore tech side of the business, the ad system, you know, contribution... Like, there's all sorts of product implications, but then there's also business operations, and what can we do, you know, more efficiently in a more personal manner by leveraging LLMs? You know, when our client success team is communicating with a customer, can we improve the communications with LLMs? And so we have a separate initiative internally designed to identify those opportunities and begin experimentation.

I guess it's worth noting, too, you know, the company, from a product and engineering standpoint, is so different than it was in kind of the prior to 2016 era. As part of our transformation, we have an internal process, an annual process, to identify all the most promising projects and really be hyper rigorous about what's the ROI on every technical initiative, every consumer, you know, product initiative that we've got. We have an estimated impact to the to revenue, and then we track it religiously, you know, throughout the year. And, you know, if something goes off the rails because, you know, we have a staffing problem or whatever, we're able to triage it. And so that's been a big part of our operational excellence and why we've been able to consistently perform for a number of years now.

Moderator

Okay. Maybe to bring David into the conversation as well, just the investment curve behind some of these initiatives. I find when I talk to companies, there's the efficiency gain narrative that people have been trying to drive over the last 6, 9, 12 months, but then there's a lot of excitement about investing against some of these longer term initiatives. How should we be thinking about the investments that need to be made to realize the potential of these initiatives versus maybe trying to strike the right balance of margin versus growth over the longer term?

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

Yeah, maybe just starting with LLMs and then speaking more broadly. The opportunity for us is large. What is very nice with regard to LLMs is that capital investment to create the weights that go into these LLMs has been made by other parties. And you have Facebook has open-sourced its weights, Amazon has a product, you know, OpenAI is offering a product. So we can rent the LLM capability, and because what you do on Yelp is narrow constrained, the cost of compute is low for us, so we're really able to take advantage of them without seeing, cost go up. Equally important is, it's not new to us using this kind of sophisticated algorithmic, matching, whether it's on the ad tech side or even for what we surface to consumers directly in the app in the feed.

So we have the database, the compute, the ability to distribute it where it needs to go, the ability to surface and display it in a way that's engaging. So none of that's new for us, so it's just fitting into what's already an operating system. So that's with regard to machine learning, and particularly LLMs or AI and LLMs in particular. More broadly, what Jeremy was saying, we go through this planning process and we look: Where is the best place to deploy our engineers to be most productive?

Moderator

Mm-hmm.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

It's the same thing that we do with sales reps, whether it's in local sales or in enterprise, and we really track it as we go through the year, and we're willing to make operating changes as we go through the year. If something isn't yielding, we're gonna shift the resources over, and I think that ability both to track the performance, to reflect on it as part of the planning process, is part of what's enabled us to drive margin. And then the last thought is, the shift to a product-led growth model does, we believe, deliver margin over time, and you saw that in the Q2 , where we had 13% growth and 25% Adjusted EBITDA margin. I think those are milestones for us.

Moderator

Yeah, understood. I do wanna turn to the service segment to make sure we get to this. You've been on a journey on the services side of the business over the last couple of years. What you mentioned earlier, the where we are now in terms of Request a Quote, but can you talk a little bit about what you've built on the services side, how you see it evolving from here? And we get a lot of questions from investors about the competitive dynamic in the services segment. You know, who are you competing with? You're obviously taking share from other players-

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah

Moderator

in the market. I mean, the numbers kind of speak for themselves.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Coming from somewhere.

Moderator

Right, the numbers kind of speak for themselves. But, just talk a little bit about competitive landscape, product roadmap, what you've built. How should we think about this business building and scale in the coming years?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, sure. I think the first thing that surprises some people that maybe haven't followed the Yelp story in a while is 60% of revenue coming from services.

Moderator

Yeah.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

You know, and where did that really begin? I mean, funny enough, as Yelp took off, we did see activity in all categories. It just turned out that we got kind of review liquidity in restaurants early on, and so the brand is very synonymous with restaurant, food, and nightlife, RFN, as we like to call it, but it did have services utility. And a number of years ago, several years ago, you know, we decided to lean in towards services with some simple adjustments. We had a messaging feature built in, to, you know, the app and the website where you can message the business, and instead of, having the phrase be, "Message the business," we tried swapping it to, "Request a Quote"-

Moderator

Yeah

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

In certain categories, and all of a sudden, we saw the volume pick up. And so we saw there was something there. There was consumer demand for that kind of functionality. It's a very simple, easy test, and that began a multi-year product strategy around how do we really elevate this experience? How do we make it ready for prime time? How do we drive valuable leads to advertisers, create an underlying matching technology, be able to deliver that consumer, not just to one business in a messaging infrastructure, but multiple businesses, so they can really have productive conversations, and it can be really efficient for consumers and a great opportunity for business owners. Fast-forward to today, that's where we're at. Request a Quote is a really great experience. It's built into many categories within services.

It drives, you know, a lot of value to businesses, and we're building on top of that with Yelp Guaranteed, which is something we recently announced, where Yelp actually leverages its brand to help step in and say to consumers, "Hey, if you interact with this business through Request a Quote, Yelp is gonna stand behind this any transaction that results up to $2,500." So what's that good for? Well, it's great for helping businesses convert. You know, you may be a new advertiser, let's say, to Yelp, and you're just getting your business started. In fact, we've had, you know, incredible creation of services businesses over the last few quarters and coming out of the pandemic. And so with that new business, how do you get started on Yelp?

Well, Yelp standing behind you with a Yelp Guaranteed is a great way to start interacting with consumers and, you know, ultimately getting leads, closing those leads, and hopefully building your reputation over time on Yelp.

Moderator

Sticking with that theme and that you sort of introduced there, how do you think about the broader cross-selling opportunity? 'Cause you built the scale you have-

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Mm-hmm.

Moderator

on the services side. Obviously, you've still got the other side of the business as well, and elements to tie those two together to sort of amplify and, you know, reduce churn, increase activity at the business level, when you think out over the medium term.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, I think there's different ways to think about the cross-selling. I mean, in one way, you could look at something like, you know, Yelp has Guest Manager, which is a front-of-house product, for instance, in the restaurant space, and we're able to sell ads and guest managers. So that's a cross-selling experience. But you can also look at it as, how can Yelp keep a simple sales process for a business that wants to get additional leads, and how can we maximize that? Well, we can make our ad tech stack more efficient. We can go off of Yelp, and take our same audience and reach them in other places on the internet to drive efficient, low-cost leads.

There's ways to extend what we do beyond just sort of the core Yelp ad product and deliver more value for that business, get a greater share of wallet, get them to increase their spend over time. So that's, you know, first and foremost where we begin, but are there additional opportunities to layer in, you know, products that have value? Absolutely. But we think, you know, the anchor is going to be driving value for businesses, delivering valuable leads, things like Request a Quote, where it's tangible, they know they're getting value, and it's a good ROI.

Moderator

Okay. On the business side, at the top line, I just wanna ask one more. Yelp Audiences, you know, you've built that into a certain level of scale. How should we think about that business evolving and the prospects for that in the years ahead?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, Yelp Audiences is really exciting, you know, relatively new offering for us, where we could take the really valuable audience we were talking about that is on Yelp.

Moderator

Yep.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

You know, in July, the 82 million Comscore users that have great demographics, and what we've heard is, you know, from our advertisers, "We want as much of that as you can give us. You know, are there other additional opportunities?" And what we've built out is a way to get that off of Yelp. So as that user travels to other places on the internet, we can still identify that user and deliver them, you know, deliver an ad opportunity to an advertiser that wants it. And so it gives us leverage for existing advertisers that are already spending, often, you know, the multi-location folks that are already spending on Yelp, and it also introduces Yelp to brand advertisers that really didn't have a home on Yelp. And so that's purely incremental and a very exciting opportunity as part of Yelp Audiences.

Moderator

Okay, so you bring it all together. We've talked about the various avenues of growth and what you're building. If we look out over the next 1-2 years, what are you most excited about in terms of the product roadmap ahead for the company, where you're like, "If we get this right, if I execute here, if the team and I get this more right than wrong, this is gonna be the biggest elements of drivers of our success?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

I mean, the number one thing I would be most excited about is the team that we've assembled.

Moderator

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

I think if you look at our execution, it's been so consistent and clean for quite some time. I feel like we have a rock star team assembled. Everybody on the bus is the right person to be on the bus, and that's what's generating the value. Like, I can tell you all the cool things that are on the roadmap, of which there are many, many things, but those ideas come from somewhere.

Moderator

Yeah.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Ultimately, it's the team. You know, it feels like the team is motivated, energized, stable, and so that gets me really excited, keeps me hopping and skipping to work every day. But from an experience standpoint, I think continuing to elevate the services experience, like seeing the growth numbers that we're getting there, the 25% in home services gets me really jazzed, like. And I'm pushing the team to try and think about: how can we really elevate that experience on the services side? How can we make Request a Quote ten times better than anything else that exists on the internet?

You know, to the point, the vision is really: how can we get to a place where someone says, "You're an idiot for not using Yelp Request a Quote?" Not just like, "Oh, yeah, it's really good," and like, "Yeah, it helped me find my mover," or what have you, but I want it to be so brain-dead, you know, so brain-dead simple for someone to say, "Look, just forget about everything else that you have tried. You have to go over to this platform. I know it takes a few steps, but it's absolutely worth it because of," insert product features here.

Moderator

Okay, all right. Very clear. David, I asked you before about investments against the AI roadmap, but broaden out the answer for us a little bit. When we think about what the highest or most pressing investment priorities are on a multi-year view, how would you and Jeremy sort of characterize what those investment priorities are that we should be thinking about as uses of capital, uses of OpEx in the business?

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

So for context, I think it's important to underscore that obviously, we've given our guidance for this year over $1.3 billion, but we're holding headcount flat. So we see this year as a proof point for leverage in the business and our ability to deliver. Then underneath that, if you're holding headcount flat, that means that you'd better be really good at allocating the resources across the business. It definitely goes to what Jeremy's saying, which is service is a very high priority for us. I would say equally, we want to drive that consumer engagement, and so we- we're continuing to update the Yelp home feed. We're using AI to make that relevant to folks. We wanna prompt people for reviews 'cause we're a content site, we're a publisher, we monetize through advertising.

So those themes remain there, as well as increasing monetization of services leads. So we're very consistent in the strategy that we set for ourselves: deliver more value, increase monetization, make sure that you're having a great consumer experience when you come to Yelp, and we're really selling through the most efficient channels. Those four topics, which have been the topics for several years now, remain the topics, and we're allocating resources against it to be productive.

Moderator

One other area that I heard on the last earnings call was a bit of a shift in the way you think about your customer acquisition strategy. Maybe talk a little bit about what informed that decision and what you think you're trying to solve for in terms of aligning sales and marketing, you know, maybe bringing it back to the funnel conversation from earlier, and what might amplify, you know, sort of user or customer growth.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

I mean, I would say we're always looking for what's the most efficient channel.

Moderator

Yeah.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

And that's been part of our strategy, you know, since 2018, as we shifted away from local. It's, you know, how far can we push multi-location? What do we need to do to drive that business forward? What are the product features that we need to align against that? What is the attribution solutions that are necessary? How is the landscape changing, et cetera? And then, on the self-service side, you know, there's a martech aspect to it. You know, how are we delivering those businesses into the flows, and then how are we streamlining the flows? You know, doing simple things like, you know, making password-less login, like, has a real impact suddenly on you can spend more money, you can drive more businesses into the flow, and all of your organic just got better.

Moderator

Right.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

So there's a lot of opportunities to optimize go-to-market there.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

Just to add, one of the things that we talked about earlier this year, and it's really a year in which we're building out the componentry, but SEM is a place where we've never played.

Moderator

Mm-hmm.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

Just on the consumer acquisition side, 2019, 2020, and 2021, we only spent $11 million.

Moderator

Yeah.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

By going into SEM, obviously, we want to generate the lead, and that's gonna be a valuable lead 'cause it's in services. But when you come to Yelp for that services pro, there is a reason to keep coming back to Yelp.

Moderator

Yeah.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

That's our broad-based consumer app advantage and the horizontal nature of the categories that we serve. So we really do see this opportunity to play in an area where you get to double up. You get much better account... You know, password-less login's necessary. Getting better at our martech stack is necessary. Making the landing page experience better is necessary. All those things will make Yelp better regardless, but that's all then a set of capabilities that we can apply to making SEM financially attractive for us.

Moderator

Mm-hmm.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

And then we want to get the person to come back. So if historically it's been, you know, come to Yelp for the restaurants, you know, stay for services, this is a little bit come for services, stay for the restaurants.

Moderator

Understood.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

Yeah.

Moderator

So for those who haven't been in tune with the Yelp story in a while, you do have some things you've identified about what your focus areas are as a company in terms of returning capital and capital allocation broadly. Can you just remind folks what your priorities are on the capital allocation front? And then maybe we've got a follow-up on that.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

Yeah. So again, you know, it starts obviously with, our budget for the team and how we allocate that, and with, a goal of holding headcount flat, by the end of the year compared to 2022. We've got to be really efficient there. In terms of capital in excess of a target cash balance, obviously, we've been repurchasing shares. I think we've closed in on $1.3 billion in share repurchases.

Moderator

Yeah.

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

We've very consistently applied back $50 million in the second and the Q1 this year, $50 million a quarter last year. So we are committed to returning capital to investors. As part of our approach, we generate a lot of free cash flow. At the same time, we're an unlevered business, and with that free cash flow, it does give us room for tuck-in acquisition. So we do hold some capital on the balance sheet for tuck-ins, and we definitely see those as an opportunity, whether it's to accelerate a feature or bring a capability to the site that may take a bit longer for us to build ourselves.

Moderator

Yeah. Sticking with that theme for a minute, there's been so much disruption in the local digital landscape and the home services landscape, and yet, when I talk to companies that might wanna deploy capital to build scale, they talk about there still being a wide bid-ask spread between some of the private companies that are out there and some of the public companies that are out there. We had a VC panel here yesterday, Andreessen, Sequoia, all the-

David Schwarzbach
Former CFO, Yelp

Mm-hmm

Moderator

... all the greats, and they were bemoaning the bid-ask spread, because I think they're looking for some M&A exits, and so -

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

They have a big ask, I presume.

Moderator

Yeah, exactly. But when you think about using capital as a tool to possibly accelerate your business plan or increase scale, how do you go through that process of thinking about that as a tool in your toolkit, Jeremy?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah. I mean, historically, we have deployed capital. You know, we've done tuck-ins before, but, you know, we're very thoughtful about it. You know, I think we don't wanna chase tennis balls. We've always been a pretty focused company. You know, if we have a long runway and we're building something and it's going well, like, we wanna lean into that first and foremost. But if there's inorganic ways to accelerate, where we think we can manage the risk, the price, you know, makes sense, I think absolutely it's something that we do contemplate. We have a, you know, corp dev team. We are constantly looking at the landscape and trying to evaluate, you know, whether it's best to build or whether it's best to buy.

And so we are, you know, very thoughtful about that, but always with a careful eye towards, like, not blowing investor money, and really focusing on ROI.

Moderator

Understood.

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah.

Moderator

So we've got about a minute or two left here. We've talked a lot about how the platform's evolved, what you're excited about on the product side, and the go-to-market strategy, some of the investments you wanna make. Bring it all together for us. You know, if we have this conversation a year from now, what are your highest priorities in terms of strategy, product, the things you're the most focused on, that you think will move the needle for Yelp as a company the most in the next twelve months?

Jeremy Stoppelman
Co-Founder and CEO, Yelp

Yeah, I mean, I think as, as the CEO, you know, there's a lot of plates that you're constantly spinning, and you're trying to keep them all revolving as fast as possible without dropping any of them. So, you know, I see my job as absolutely continuing to curate, like, the stellar team that, that we've got, continuing to lean in on the, the product and engineering side, where, you know, we're already seeing opportunities or where there's new opportunities, like leveraging LLM. I mean, there's low-hanging fruit everywhere, like, you know, from consumer features to deep within the ad system. You know, we're well into our planning process right now.

That's both a lot of stress, but a lot of fun as we see all the new ideas, we start attaching approximate revenue numbers to them, and that gets us really excited and motivated as we, you know, look towards 2024.

Moderator

Okay. Well, Jeremy, David, I really appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation this year. Please join me in thanking the team from Yelp for being part of the conference this year.

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