Founder Profile
Russel Simmons
Last reviewed: October 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Who is Russel Simmons?
Russel Simmons is a founder of Yelp Inc., which was founded in 2004 with Jeremy Stoppelman.
- Company founded
- Yelp Inc.
- Founded
- 2004
- Co-founders
- Jeremy Stoppelman
Background
Software engineer and early PayPal employee.
Founding Story
Russel Simmons co-founded Yelp in 2004 alongside Jeremy Stoppelman. As the absolute critical technical architect (and a veteran of the legendary 'PayPal Mafia'), he built the incredibly robust early backend infrastructure and recommendation algorithms that allowed Yelp to massively scale its millions of user reviews without crashing.
Simmons was Yelp's chief technology officer from July 2004 until June 2010. He had been a lead software architect at PayPal and graduated in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998. He founded Learnirvana in 2014. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).