Timothy Koogle

Timothy Koogle is CEO of Yahoo! Inc., the most heavily trafficked Internet portal in the world with roughly 100 million visitors every month. For free, Yahoo! browsers can do everything from sending and receiving email and searching for old classmates to booking airline flights and car rentals and creating online photo albums. Koogle oversaw Yahoo!'s growth from a small upstart Internet search engine company in 1995 into an online powerhouse that offers more than 400 different services to its individual and business customers. Koogle is also credited for parlaying the firm into one of the few dot.com ventures to actually earn a profit. Although he announced plans to step down as CEO Yahoo! in 2001, Koogle will remain chairman.

After completing his undergraduate work in mechanical engineering at the University of Virginia in 1973, Koogle began pursuing a graduate degree at Stanford University. He earned a Master's degree in electrical engineering in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics a few years later. Koogle paid for school by working as an automobile mechanic for his fellow students. An attempt to create his own robotics company fizzled in 1982, and Motorola Corp. hired him a year later as a management executive. In 1992, Koogle was named president at Intermec, a data communications firm based in Seattle, Washington, known for creating bar-code technology.

In early 1995, Yahoo!'s young founders, 27-year-old Jerry Yang and 30-year-old David Filo, began searching for a seasoned executive to run the business that had started with a simple list of favorite World Wide Web sites. Yang and Filo knew they lacked the management experience to run a company, and they sought someone with an entrepreneurial spirit who could also lend the fledgling firm credibility. When they asked the 49-year-old Koogle to head up Yahoo!, he was still working for Intermec, which was owned by Litton Industries. His frustrations there over Litton's reticence to let him pursue rapid growth outweighed his uncertainty about the viability of a Web-based business. Koogle agreed to run Yahoo! in May of 1995. The firm's lucrative initial public offering in April 1996 allowed Koogle to launch an acquisition spree that would eventually exceed $10 billion. In September of 1997, Yahoo! bought a news delivery service, as well as technology that allowed it to add people-searching and e-mail capabilities to its free online services. Purchases in the following year allowed Yahoo! users to play games and shop. Koogle also oversaw two major deals in 1999: the $4 billion acquisition of Geocities and the $5.7 billion acquisition of video service provider Broadcast.com. Koogle's reason for the bold growth strategy was simple: the more features, services, and content Yahoo! offered, the more visitors it would attract. More visitors meant more advertising dollars.

Advertising is what allowed Yahoo! to set itself apart from other dot.com upstarts because it was advertising that enabled Yahoo! to achieve profitability. The firm developed technology that allowed it to monitor a visitor's online activity and also control what banner bars and button ads are displayed on the pages that visitor is browsing. Yahoo! is also able to monitor how many hits an advertisement receives, a valuable tool for determining an advertisement's reach.

Business Week named Koogle one of the "Top 25 Executives of the Year" in 1999. That year, Yahoo! became the only Internet-based venture besides America Online to be listed on Standard & Poor's 500 stock index. Yahoo! stock reached a high of $237.50 per share in January 2000. Like most other Internet-based ventures, though, Yahoo! saw its share prices begin to crumble when the U.S. economy slowed down later in the year. The firm was hit particularly hard because its advertising revenue came mainly from the dot.com ventures that were forced to slash their advertising budgets as they fought to stay afloat. Yahoo! began securing advertising from bricks and mortar firms; because they were also tightening their advertising budgets, though, Yahoo! was unable to line up new customers as quickly as Koogle had hoped. To reduce the firm's reliance on advertising, which accounted for roughly 85 percent of annual sales in 2000, Koogle began steering Yahoo! into new fee-based services for consumers, such as online bill paying and auctioning objects for sale. New services for corporate clients included e-store management services.

Koogle's efforts failed to turn Yahoo! around quickly enough to satisfy investors. In 2001, when rumors began to circulate that Yahoo! was vulnerable to a takeover, the firm implemented a poison pill, which is a shareholders' rights program that makes a hostile takeover very costly for a buyer. In March of that year, with Yahoo's stock hovering at roughly $21 per share, Koogle announced his intent to step down as CEO of Yahoo! as soon as a replacement was found.