_Hoffman

=__Begins with Presentation__=

Happy Map
- Some findings: - West coast tends to be more happy than the East coast - Lunch time is when people seem to be most happy - As number of tweets goes up, amount of happiness decreases - Uses sentiment analysis to determine "happiness"

__Auren Hoffman // CEO Rapleaf__
- Yelp Discussion
 * What are people's impressions of Yelp?
 * Want to create a community of people
 * Want people to review
 * Explicit vs. Implicit Places
 * Explicit - a site where people explicitly write data (i.e. reviews, wall posts, etc)
 * Implicit - a site where people go to to look at data or query for data etc (i.e. Google)
 * Some companies can be both (i.e. think Amazon)
 * Yelp is an explicit site
 * One of the reasons we trust Yelp is because we trust the community
 * Yelp also uses a variety of techniques to encourage users to continue to **submit reviews**
 * This is important as Yelp relies on a wealth of this kind of explicit data
 * But can we find some implicit value that can be derived from Yelp?
 * To be good at getting Explicit data is a **marketing** challenge
 * To be good at getting Implicit data is an **engineering** challenge

- How would we build an implicit version of Yelp?
 * To get some data - think crawling
 * Crawl the web for reviews / ratings
 * Crawl facebook twitter data for venue names / sentiment
 * Partnerships feeding in data
 * Government data
 * get business license data (eg. Health violations, lawsuits etc.)
 * get business license data (eg. Health violations, lawsuits etc.)
 * Once we have the data, how do we know when people are talking about the same thing?
 * Find a common key
 * Perhaps a phone number? Or the address?
 * We can use some engineering to normalize all of this data

The power of explicit vs implicit
 * Engineering culture --> implicit
 * Business / Marketing culture --> explicit
 * Both are just as hard in terms of quality of information
 * Things to think about when starting a company
 * Sentiment analysis is often best down implicitly

- Conclusion Rapleaf History
 * When thinking about a product - try to frame it as an explicit site or an implicit site
 * Perhaps there exists an explicit search engine (i.e. Facebook maybe?) that might be a Google killer
 * Perhaps there exists an implicit restaurant review site that might be a Yelp killer
 * These things might exist - but no one has been able to do them well yet
 * Originally were an explicit site for people to rate other people
 * Original goal: "By showing people how good they are and incentivizing people to be good, make everyone in the world good"
 * Turns out, "Good" is hard to evaluate in different contexts
 * Eventually, became a data company that focuses on helping companies market their products to the right segment of consumers

Philosophy on Teams
 * Surround yourself with people who are really really smart
 * Education may not be the greatest indicator
 * Surround yourself with people who get things done
 * Do you really like this person you work with?

Created by Jason Wei (jwei512@stanford.edu), George Tang (gtang7@stanford.edu)