Was it just me, or is the tone of this article really off-putting? It seems like the author is praising how Yelp did everything right and all their past decisions are Just Great. There&#x27;s no mention of any missteps the company made. The reality is that startups make mistakes, and Yelp is not an exception. It&#x27;s like the author is telling a rosy story of the company past and omitting all the bad parts.<p>Jeremy Stoppelman, the co-founder of Yelp, has a much more modest story of why they started Yelp Elite.<p>&quot;[W]e had at the time one marketing person who was like, ”Maybe we should meet some of our users that are addicted Yelpers now. . . . They’re in San Francisco; we’re in San Francisco, it can’t be that hard to meet up.” And I thought, ”That’s a great idea, let’s look these people in the eye.” . . . We had this first meeting; it was this really social bunch that came out and met up with us for drinks, and we’re like, ”Wow, this is really interesting.” [The meetings] sort of spun out of that. We did our major event [at] Armani Café. It was really successful. People had a great time. . . . So it just seemed like, ”Hey this really fits and makes a ton of sense, so let’s just keep doing it.” And so we kept doing it, and it got bigger and bigger and now [we’re] a little notorious for it.&quot;<p>(Quote sourced from the 2011 HBS case study on Yelp)