Jerry Yang

A native of Taiwan, Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in March of 1995 at the age of 27. What began in 1993 as an effort by two Stanford University doctoral students—Yang and his partner David Filo—to catalog their favorite World Wide Web sites eventually evolved into the world's busiest Internet portal. By the year 2000, the site was logging more than 100 million visitors every month. Yang remains a member of Yahoo!'s board of directors and plays a major role, in conjunction with CEO Tim Koogle, in steering the company's growth strategy. Yang owns roughly eight percent of Yahoo!'s stock.

Yang's family moved from Taiwan to San Jose, California, in 1978, when Yang was 10 years old. He won a scholarship to Stanford University, where he earned both his Bachelor's and Master's degree in just four years. Yang gained his first experience cataloging information with a part-time job at the university's library, where he sorted and shelved books. He was working on an advanced degree in electrical engineering at Stanford when he met Filo in 1989. In the early 1990s, the two began using Mosaic to browse the fledgling World Wide Web. They eventually created a program that would allow them to group Web sites into subject categories. The duo dubbed the resulting list of sites, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," and posted it on the Web. Positive e-mail responses from Web surfers all over the world prompted Yang and Filo to begin indexing all sites on the Web. They set a goal of cataloging 1000 sites per day, and when subject categories became too large, they added layers of subcategories.

The site's popularity grew rapidly, and Stan-ford's server began struggling under the increased traffic load. As a result, the university asked Yang and Filo to find another organization to host what they had renamed Yahoo!, an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." Buyout offers emerged from executives at Netscape, AOL, and what would become other leading Internet firms, but Yang and Filo turned them down. Instead, they agreed to take a leave of absence from their studies to co-found Yahoo! Inc. After securing financial backing from Sequoia Capital, Yang and Filo hired Tim Koogle to run the business. The more outgoing of the pair, Yang focused his attention on turning Yahoo! into a popular brand name, while Filo focused on the technological aspects of the operation. When the company went public in 1996, Yang and Filo found themselves millionaires, and as Yahoo's stock prices soared in the late 1990s, they eventually reached billionaire status.

Yahoo stands apart from most Internet-based ventures because it actually turns a profit. Advertising accounts for most of the company's revenues. Technology that allows the firm to track a visitor's online activity also lets Yahoo! control what banner bars and button ads that visitor sees. Yahoo! is also able to monitor how many hits an advertisement receives as a way of judging an ad's effectiveness. These advertising functions, though, are only a source of profits because of the firm's intense traffic levels. It is Yang who is most often credited for creating a site that attracts more visitors than most others. According to an April 2000 Advertising Age article, Yang created a "destination where Web surfers could get whatever they wanted from the site's personalized content, e-commerce offerings, special promotions, and other interactive data." Yang did this by continually forging alliances with companies as a means of offering new products and technology to users. For example, a 1999 alliance with Motorola Inc. allowed Yahoo! to expand into wireless Internet service. At the same time, Yang also worked to expand Yahoo!'s services to include things like e-store management and Web site construction.

In 2001, Yahoo! was forced to pause as declining advertising revenues and tumbling stock prices took their toll on the firm's bottom line. As a result, Yang stepped up his management role, and announced at a March 2001 press conference that Yahoo! was searching outside the company for a new CEO to replace Koogle.