Yelp

OpenAI

Yelp

Local advertising. Yelp is free for consumers and free for businesses to claim their listing.

Revenue comes from selling advertising products to local businesses — sponsored listings that appear at the top of search results, enhanced profiles with photos and call-to-action buttons, and Yelp Ads that target users searching for relevant businesses. Approximately 95% of revenue comes from local advertising, making Yelp essentially an ad platform for small businesses.

The company also earns from Yelp Reservations, Yelp Waitlist, and transaction-based fees on food orders. Revenue is recurring — businesses pay monthly for advertising packages — but churn is high because small businesses often cancel when they don't see immediate ROI.

OpenAI

OpenAI makes money primarily through API access and subscriptions. The API charges developers per token (roughly per word) for using GPT models in their applications.

ChatGPT Plus costs $20/month for individual users, ChatGPT Team is $25-30/user/month, and ChatGPT Enterprise is custom-priced. Microsoft pays OpenAI licensing fees and also resells OpenAI models through Azure OpenAI Service.

OpenAI's annualised revenue ran past $13 billion during 2025 and kept climbing from there, which is the kind of growth curve that normally only exists in a pitch deck.

Yelp

Jeremy Stoppelman got sick after eating at a restaurant and wanted to find a doctor recommendation online. There was nothing useful.

He and Russel Simmons — both former PayPal employees — started Yelp in 2004, originally as an email-based referral system where you'd email friends asking for recommendations. That didn't work.

But they noticed that the reviews people wrote as part of the referral process were the actual valuable content. They pivoted to a review platform where anyone could write reviews of local businesses — restaurants, dentists, plumbers, mechanics, anything.

The social element was key: reviewers had profiles, could be friends, and the best reviewers became "Yelp Elite" with status and perks. By 2008, Yelp had turned reviewing restaurants into a hobby, a social activity, and for some people, an identity.

Google reportedly offered $500 million to acquire Yelp in 2009. Stoppelman turned it down and took the company public in 2012.

OpenAI

OpenAI was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research lab. The founding donors — including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Jessica Livingston — pledged $1 billion with a mission to build artificial general intelligence (AGI) that would benefit all of humanity.

The idea was that AI was too important and too dangerous to leave in the hands of Google alone.

Sam Altman became chairman while Greg Brockman (former CTO of Stripe) became president. Ilya Sutskever, one of the most respected AI researchers alive, left Google Brain to become chief scientist.

The early team was stacked with world-class researchers who published their work openly — hence "Open" AI.

But AI research turned out to be staggeringly expensive. Training large models required millions of dollars in compute.

In 2019, OpenAI created a "capped-profit" subsidiary — investors could earn up to 100x their money, but profits beyond that would flow to the nonprofit. Microsoft invested $1 billion.

The mission was still to save humanity. The method now involved making a lot of money first.

Yelp

User-generated content created a flywheel: more reviews attracted more consumers, which attracted more businesses, which attracted more reviewers. Yelp Elite Squad gamified reviewing, turning prolific reviewers into evangelists who hosted events and recruited new users.

SEO dominance — Yelp pages rank highly on Google for local business searches, driving organic traffic that costs nothing to acquire. City-by-city launch strategy with community managers in each market building local reviewer communities.

Advertising sales team calling local businesses directly — a labor-intensive but effective model for monetizing the platform. Mobile app became critical as smartphones made "find a restaurant near me" a constant use case.

Expansion into services (plumbers, contractors, mechanics) beyond restaurants to increase addressable market.

OpenAI

ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 was the growth strategy — it just wasn't planned that way. The team expected a modest research preview.

Instead, ChatGPT hit 1 million users in 5 days and 100 million monthly active users in 2 months, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. The product went viral because it felt like magic — for the first time, anyone could have a natural conversation with a machine that seemed to understand them.

The Microsoft partnership provided distribution at massive scale. Microsoft integrated OpenAI models into Bing, Office 365 (Copilot), GitHub (Copilot), and Azure.

Overnight, hundreds of millions of Microsoft users had access to OpenAI technology. Microsoft's $13 billion investment was the largest AI bet in history and gave OpenAI nearly unlimited compute.

The API created an ecosystem. Thousands of startups built products on top of OpenAI's models — from customer service bots to coding assistants to content generators.

Each API customer locked themselves into OpenAI's ecosystem, creating switching costs and recurring revenue.

Yelp

Google is the existential threat. Google Maps reviews have overtaken Yelp in volume and are embedded directly in search results, intercepting users before they ever reach Yelp.

Stock performance has been mediocre — shares are roughly flat over the past five years while the broader market doubled. The business model depends on selling advertising to small businesses, which are notoriously difficult and expensive to sell to (high churn, small budgets, skeptical owners).

Yelp has been accused of manipulating reviews to pressure businesses into advertising — allegations the company denies but which have damaged its reputation. Review fraud (fake positive reviews, competitor sabotage reviews) is a constant battle.

And the broader shift to social media for recommendations (Instagram, TikTok, Reddit) is eroding Yelp's relevance with younger users.

OpenAI

The board crisis of November 2023 nearly destroyed the company. The nonprofit board fired Sam Altman as CEO on a Friday, citing a loss of confidence.

Within 48 hours, 95% of employees threatened to quit and follow Altman to Microsoft. By Tuesday, Altman was reinstated and the board was restructured.

The incident exposed the fundamental tension between OpenAI's nonprofit governance and its for-profit ambitions — a tension it finally addressed in late 2025 by restructuring the business as a public benefit corporation sitting under the original nonprofit.

The cost of training frontier models is eye-watering. Each new GPT generation costs hundreds of millions to train.

OpenAI is reportedly spending over $7 billion annually on compute. The company is burning through cash faster than almost any startup in history, which is why it keeps raising at higher and higher valuations.

If revenue growth slows before costs stabilize, the math gets ugly.

Safety concerns are not going away. Multiple prominent researchers have left OpenAI over disagreements about the pace of development versus safety research.

Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist who was central to the board's decision to fire Altman, left in 2024 to start a safety-focused AI lab. The public debate about whether OpenAI is moving too fast — and whether its safety commitments are genuine — grows louder with every capability improvement.

Yelp

Business listings and reviews — 265+ million reviews across every local business category. Yelp for Restaurants — reservations, waitlist management, and ordering integrated into business pages.

Yelp Ads — advertising platform letting businesses target users by category, location, and intent. Yelp for Business Owners — dashboard for responding to reviews, tracking page views, and managing business info.

Yelp Elite Squad — gamified community of prolific reviewers who get invited to exclusive events. Yelp Guest Manager — restaurant management tool combining waitlist, reservations, and table management.

Yelp Knowledge Program — data licensing to power local search across third-party platforms.

OpenAI

ChatGPT is the consumer chatbot — the product that made AI mainstream overnight. The flagship GPT models are multimodal, handling text, images, and audio in one system.

The OpenAI API lets developers integrate GPT into any application. DALL-E generates images from text descriptions.

Whisper transcribes and translates audio. Sora generates videos from text prompts.

GPT Store lets users create and share custom GPT agents. ChatGPT Enterprise gives businesses a private, secure version of ChatGPT with admin controls and no data training.

Yelp

Pre-IPO investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Yelp went public on the NYSE in March 2012.

OpenAI

Microsoft ($13B), Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Tiger Global, SoftBank, a16z