Marketplace Tech With Molly Wood

As we close out the year and look ahead at 2025, we wanted to mark an anniversary of sorts: 20 years ago, the online review site Yelp was launched — the name reportedly a mashup of “help” and “Yellow Pages.”It started as an email service to send personal recommendations to your friends, then in 2005 morphed into the standalone review site we now know. Yelp wasn’t the first in the online review game, but it has been among the most popular and enduring.Andrea Rubin has been at the company almost from the beginning. She joined in 2006 as the first community manager in Chicago. She’s now the senior vice president for community nationally.“I absolutely loved my city and loved local businesses, and I just loved being able to share my thoughts on these local businesses through the Yelp platform,” Rubin said. “I was like, ‘Well, if I love this, I know there’s many other people who are going to love it as well.’”Yelp has now accrued almost 300 million reviews worldwide. And the site has helped usher in our current sta