UEA graduate Bob Goodson talks about helping to develop the Like Button
By: UEA Alumni team
Bob Goodson graduated from UEA in 2002 with a BA in English Literature and Philosophy. He went on to further study at the University of Oxford where he studied for an MPhil in Medieval Literature, focusing on language theory. Throughout his studies, he was an active entrepreneur, starting businesses and founding student societies. In 2004, Bob moved to San Francisco and became the first employee at Yelp where he helped to develop what would become the Like button we see and use today. He then set up his business Quid, which uses A.I. to harness the power of the written word.
Bob has co-authored a book being published by Harvard in April 2025 and available for pre-order (Like: The Button That Changed the World) all about the surprising stories behind the creation of the Like button and what it reveals about innovation, business, culture and us.
We were thrilled to be able to put some questions to him.
Where did your UEA journey begin?
I grew up on the North Norfolk coast and UEA was the closest university. I did look at lots of different places to go to university, and my first intention had been to get far away from Norfolk and explore. However, I had taken a gap year after A-Levels to work at Aviva in Norwich and developed friends at UEA. I’d gotten a feel for the place over that year and felt at home at UEA. I was also very keen to study with Prof Peter Womack, who I was sure was the smartest person I had ever met!
One of the things that surprised me when I joined UEA was that there was such a global community. Even in 1999 there were people from all over the globe studying a huge variety of subjects. It felt like another world and all on one campus.
What were your expectations when you decided to study English Literature and philosophy?
Long before university, I had a deep interest in language. I got drawn into studying literature and philosophy because of my interest in the underlying question of what language is and its amazing power to shape our mindsets and therefore, the world. An arrangement of words can become so important over time and that fascinated me. The mysterious power of words will never cease to fascinate me and has just entered a whole new era with the scaling of Large Language Models.
I had no idea what English and Philosophy would lead to, but it felt right to me.
What are some of your favourite UEA memories?
I started the UEA Yoga Club in 1999 realising there were no classes on campus and in our third year the university told me it was the most popular sport on campus, and I got the award for contributions to societies that year.
A memory I’m often reminded of is something I missed! A flatmate from the F-Block of Norfolk Terrace was trying to get us all to come along to this gig at the LCR that night. He was from the West Country and said he knew some of the band members from school and that it was one of their first ever gigs. I passed up the offer because no-one had heard of them and I figured they would be terrible. I also didn’t mind too much when they said how great it had been and that they’d even got to hang out with the band after the gig. A week later, I picked up NME and saw the band on the front cover. The band was Muse. He still ribs me about my decision not to go, to this day.
Bob at his UEA Yoga Stand at Societies Fair (2000)
And how did your interest in business come about while studying?
I’ve always been interested in building teams and organisations. I’d started a football club when I was a teenager for the kids in my village and I'd created various endeavours to make money through my teenage years.
When I got to UEA I started my first proper businesses. One was called Prana Publications which was a yoga publishing business which I started in 1999, and the other was a design agency which I started in 2000 that offered corporate identity work and logo design. I didn't think of those as startups at the time. The word startup really wasn't around or used at the time. I just was trying to find creative ways to test myself and learn but also make money while I was studying at UEA and helping to pay my way through my studies here.
UEA was an amazing environment for developing these interests. It felt like a very interdisciplinary community and has always been designed that way, being founded on ‘Do Different’. Innovation is in the DNA of UEA and I really felt that while studying there. People from all different subjects were coming together to start things, create and push past boundaries.
And how did you develop these entrepreneurial instincts after UEA?
After UEA, I went to Oxford to do a two-year MPhil degree in Mediaeval literature. While I was there, I co-founded a group called Oxford Entrepreneurs, which was the first student community of student entrepreneurs in the university’s 750-year history.
I found my experiences with societies at UEA had given me a lot of confidence, and leading this new group was so exciting – it was an incredible hive of activity with so much talent and energy. I helped start 40 companies when I was at Oxford through my Start A Company programme, and many of the entrepreneurs involved have gone on to do amazing things, including the Collison brothers, who shortly after started payments company, Stripe.
How did your career in tech begin?
In 2003, when I was at Oxford, I went to a talk by an entrepreneur who had started PayPal, a guy called Max Levchin. Watching him speak on stage about the scale that PayPal had reached, the number of people it was serving, and the way they thought about the technology was life changing. They were talking about business philosophically, they were thinking about the politics, they were thinking about the future and thinking about how to disrupt existing inefficient systems. Until that day, I had never encountered people that thought like this. It was like a new world opened up to me during that talk.
I sat in the audience connecting with these ideas for the first time and decided I should do everything I can to work with and learn from these people. I met Max after the talk and showed him my portfolio of things I'd worked on, told him about my company, and I showed him an early social network that I'd built for students at Oxford in 2002, two years before Facebook started. He asked me to visit his colleagues in San Francisco a couple of months later, and within a few weeks of that trip I dropped out of Oxford and moved to San Francisco.
I ended working for him on three companies in an incubator, and one of them was called Yelp, a local review website, which was innovative and pushing web boundaries long before social media platforms had become well established. I became Yelp’s first employee, hired by the co-founders. Yelp is now used by 140 million people per month and employs 4,800 people.
I found myself in the middle of this community of people who were way more experienced than me and had done other things before. Even then, in the whole of San Francisco, I estimate that there were probably only about 50 to 100 people that were deliberately trying to build stuff in that space in 2003, which is when I arrived. I found myself in this community of people working on things like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
Bob outside Norfolk Terrace, where he lived in first year
And how did the Like button innovation come about?
We were trying new things out at Yelp one day in May 2005. We put buttons on our content that people could easily click on to share that they found it useful or funny or cool. We were the first to put multiple emotions on a piece of web content and the first to let you react to content with a single click that did not leave the page and reacted when you clicked it. It sounds obvious now, but back then it was totally new.
We had no idea or perspective that we were doing something important because you do stuff all day, and that was just that day's design challenge. And yet we contributed to the development and invention of what then became known as the like button and subsequently evolved into various reaction buttons that you see all over your apps, all over your content. We estimate that they are now clicked 7 billion times a day.
Why have you written a book about this experience now?
The Like button has become one of the most important user interface features ever developed. What has intrigued me as I’ve watched it develop over the last 20 years is observing things that have worked and those that have not. At some point I just asked myself, “How did this thing come about? Who were all the people involved? And what does it have to teach us about how innovation works? Why do we like to like things?”
Together, with a good friend of mine, Martin Reeves, we’ve spent four years researching the book. We’ve interviewed 100 people – neuroscientists to anthropologists through to many of the people that helped develop the button at different stages.
What advice do you have for our students and graduates looking to start their own businesses?
There is so much value in just getting started with something and seeing where it goes. It’s very easy to overthink and get in your own way.
Almost nothing you try and create that's important ends up being the thing you thought at the start, and you only realise that by trying things. Just get started and roll with it. Put yourself in the furnace. That’s where the good stuff happens. The furnace is intense, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s only by going there that you discover your best work and what customers really want.
Later on - once you're in a career - I think there's real value in asking yourself “What is the most important problem in my field and am I working on it?” Every field has its important problems, and it's usually obvious. Can you make sure that you’re working on that problem?