Jerry Yang

Cofounder of Yahoo!

• Born: November 6, 1968
• Birthplace: Taipei, Taiwan

Primary Company/Organization: Yahoo!

Introduction

Along with Stanford University colleague David Filo, Jerry Yang created a directory of websites located on the internet that eventually became known as Yahoo! Quickly evolving into one of the world's leading websites, the company became a major player in the rise of the internet era. Yahoo!'s success made Yang an influential billionaire, though he stepped down as chief executive officer (CEO) in 2009 and left the company altogether in 2012 as it continued to evolve.

Early Life

Jerry Yang was born Yáng Zhìyu in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 6, 1968. His father died when he was two years old. In 1978, his mother, an English teacher in Taiwan, moved to San Jose, California, with Yang and his younger brother. Although he knew only a few words of English when he began as a student San Jose's Sierramont Middle School, by the time Yang graduated three years later he was considered fluent. A resident of San Jose's Berryessa district, Yang attended Piedmont Hills High School, where he did well academically, taking a variety of advanced placement (AP) classes, including AP English. Upon graduation from Piedmont Hills, Yang entered Stanford University, where he studied electrical engineering.

Yang excelled while at Stanford. While an undergraduate, he was a member of the Phi Kappa Psi social fraternity. Upon graduation, Yang was accepted into a doctoral program in electrical engineering at Stanford, and he worked as a research assistant while doing his graduate work. In 1989, Yang met David Filo, who became his fast friend and future business partner. In April 1994, Filo expressed frustration to Yang regarding difficulty he was experiencing keeping track of favorite websites that he found while browsing the internet with the then-new Mosaic browser software. Yang and Filo created what they termed "Jerry and Dave's Guide to the World Wide Web." This site, which evolved into Yahoo!, was a directory of other websites arranged in a hierarchy based on relevance rather than as a searchable list or index. The website soon began to consume so much of their time that Yang and Filo requested, and received, an academic leave of absence from Stanford to work on their website. Although Yang earned a master's degree in electrical engineering, he never returned to Stanford to complete his doctorate.

Life's Work

In short order, news of the new web portal swept the internet, causing Stanford to request that Yang and Filo find a commercial host for their website, as increased traffic was causing problems for the university's internet service. By this time, other popular web portals, such as Netscape Communications and America Online (AOL) had taken notice of Yang and Filo's work and made offered to buy them out. The two decided to establish their own company instead, and they adopted the name Yahoo! for their website. Although various stories regarding reasons for the change exist, the change was made essentially to establish a brand for the service, and the yahoo.com domain was created in January 1995. Because of trademark issues related to the name, Yang and Filo included an exclamation mark in the official name of the site (although it is often omitted in media references). Yang and Filo chose the term yahoo because they felt it encapsulated the internet's wild and untamed image. Yahoo! has also sometimes been purported to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," although this acronym was developed after the adoption of the name.

When Yahoo! had more than a million hits before the end of 1994, Yang and Filo recognized the potential for their search engine. The business was incorporated in March 1995 and immediately generated interest from venture capitalists. Sequoia Capital invested approximately $3 million in April, paving the way for the company's initial public offering (IPO) the following year. The IPO was a success, with 2.6 million shares sold at $13 apiece, allowing the company to raise almost $34 million.

By the late 1990s, Yahoo! faced competition from a variety of other web portals, including Lycos, excite, and Ask Jeeves. In an effort to attract as many users as possible, Yang determined that Yahoo! must compete by offering other services in an attempt to gain as many users as possible. To further this goal, he led Yahoo! to acquire Four11 Corporation in 1997. Four11 had developed the popular RocketMail, a free e-mail service that rivaled Microsoft Corporation's Hotmail as the most popular messaging service during the late 1990s. Yahoo! rebranded RocketMail as Yahoo! Mail, which continued to be popular, even becoming the most popular e-mail service in the United States for a time. Yahoo! also purchased ClassicGames.com, which evolved into Yahoo! Games, a service allowing users to play online games either with themselves or by interacting with other users. Offering both free games and those that could be downloaded for a fee, Yahoo! Games proved especially popular with the otherwise hard-to-reach young male demographic.

During this period, Yahoo! also acquired GeoCities, a website that allowed for the hosting of user-created websites, and eGroups, an e-mail list management system. These services were rebranded as Yahoo! GeoCities and Yahoo! Groups. Although these acquisitions were sometimes controversial with investors, they drew many users to the parent site and helped Yahoo! achieve the status as one of the top two Internet sites by 2000 (trailing only AOL.com).

The dot-com boom, sometimes referred to as the dot-com bubble, was a period stretching from 1995 until 2000 that saw the value of stocks associated with the Internet and other related technology fields increase exponentially. Yahoo! saw its stock price double during December 1999 alone. By January 3, 2000, Yahoo!'s stock hit an all-time high value of more than $118 per share. By September 2001, however, this would drop to an all-time low of $8.11 as the industry bubble burst. Although this drop was dramatic, and devastating to many shareholders, Yahoo! survived the dot-com downturn unlike many of its rivals. This was in part due to the fact that Yang instituted a series of partnerships that allowed Yahoo! to join with other internet companies to provide content, access, and other services. Companies with which Yahoo! entered such partnerships included AOL, Southwestern Bell Corporation (SBC), and Verizon Communications. These partnerships helped to stabilize Yahoo! and allowed its stock price to gradually rebound.

While Yahoo! had been founded on its ability to provide users with access to a variety of other websites, the search engines used on Yahoo!'s website were at times outsourced to others. In 1996, for example, AltaVista, a division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), became the exclusive provider of search functions for Yahoo! By 2000, Yahoo! had entered into a similar agreement with Google, whereby Yahoo! used Google's search engines for searches conducted on the Yahoo! site. As Google became increasingly dominant as a search engine, Yahoo! sought to bolster its search capabilities by providing these services on its own. As a result, Yahoo! Search set out to develop its own search technology, acquiring Inktomi Corporation in 2002 and a year later purchasing Overture Services, which by then owned AltaVista. By 2003, Yahoo! was able to abandon its agreement with Google and provide its own search results, using a reinvented web crawler termed Yahoo! Slurp. By 2009, Yahoo! was the search engine of choice of approximately 6.5 percent of web users, trailing market leader Google, which claimed 85 percent of users. At that point, Yahoo! decided once again to abandon its own search capacity and entered into an agreement with Microsoft Corporation whereby that entity's Bing web search engine would be used by Yahoo!'s site.

Dealings with Microsoft led to one of Yang's most controversial and unpopular decisions as CEO. In 2005, Microsoft was alarmed by Google's increasing dominance as an Internet search engine. In an effort to combat this, Microsoft entered discussions to acquire Yahoo, talks that took place from 2005 through 2007. When the two companies were unable to come to an agreement regarding Microsoft's acquisition of Yahoo, Microsoft made an unsolicited takeover bid for Yahoo! in 2008. Microsoft's offer valued Yahoo! at $44.8 billion, significantly more than what many analysts believed Yahoo! to be worth. After Yang demanded that Microsoft increase its bid by $3 per share, Microsoft withdrew its bid and the share value of Yahoo! plunged, leaving the company with a value of $20 billion by November 2008.

Yang also displeased many in 2005 when Yahoo! cooperated with the Chinese government and provided government officials the IP addresses of Chinese dissidents who used Yahoo! Mail to circulate statements critical of the Chinese government. Yahoo!'s disclosure led to the arrest of activist journalist Shi Tao, who was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison for his release of a document relating to the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising. Yahoo! was criticized by a variety of groups, and Yang was called to Washington, DC, to answer questions from members of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs regarding Yahoo!'s role in the arrest of Shi Tao and other Chinese journalists. Yang later asked then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for assistance in freeing the imprisoned dissidents. Yahoo! also settled a series of lawsuits filed by dissidents who were arrested by the Chinese government as the result of documents released to them by Yahoo! relating to Yahoo! Mail accounts.

Although long a member of Yahoo!'s management team, Yang officially became CEO of the company for the first time in June 2007. In early 2009, Yang resigned as CEO to be replaced by Carol A. Bartz, although he maintained his membership on Yahoo!'s board of directors. Bartz was removed from her job in September 2011, and Yang announced his resignation as a director on January 17, 2012.

After his time at Yahoo!, Yang operated as a technology investor through his company AME Cloud Ventures. Among the startups he funded were the cybersecurity firm Vectra Networks and the organizational app Evernote.

Personal Life

In 1992, while part of a Stanford exchange program in Kyoto, Yang met fellow Stanford student Akiko Yamazaki, whom he later married. Yamazaki is of Japanese ancestry and was born and grew up in Costa Rica. Yang and Yamazaki are both involved in the Wildlife Conservation Network, indicating their support for environmental sustainability. In 2007, Yang and Yamazaki donated $75 million to Stanford University for the construction of a building devoted to environmental education.

Yahoo! developed out of Yang's hobby for programming code that would improve his Internet experience. While a part of Yahoo!'s management team, Yang continued to advocate for those experiences that made use of the web portal fun and engaging. Yang served as a member of the boards of directors of Cisco Systems and the Asian Pacific Fund, as well as the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

Bibliography

Cassidy, John. Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money on the Internet. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print.

"Jerry Yang." The Immigrant Learning Center, Sept. 2018, www.ilctr.org/entrepreneur-hof/jerry-yang/. Accessed 29 Oct. 2019.

Perlroth, Nicole, and Evelyn M. Rusli. "Jerry Yang, 'Chief Yahoo,' Steps Down from Board." New York Times 18 Jan. 2012: 6. Print.

Smith, Bob, and Anthony Vlamis. Do You? Business the Yahoo! Way: Secrets of the World's Most Popular Internet Company. North Mankato: Capstone, 2000. Print.

Weston, Michael R. Jerry Yang and David Filo: The Founders of Yahoo! New York: Rosen, 2007. Print.

"Yahoo! Why Yang Is Holding Out." Business Week 4088 (2008): 30–31. Print.