David Filo is a tech entrepreneur and businessman who co-founded Yahoo! with Jerry Yang. In March 2013 his approximate net worth was $1.7 billion making him the 882^nd wealthiest person of the world.

Childhood and Education

Filo was born on 20^th April 1966 in Wisconsin. His family moved to a suburb in Moss Bluff in Louisiana. He studied at the Sam Houston High School and then attended the Tulane University where he got his BS degree in computer engineering. His success story actually begins from Stanford where he enrolled for post graduate studies. There he met Jerry Yang and the two doctoral candidates immediately hit it off during their computer chip designing project. However they did not find the work interesting and when their teacher took a leave so did they. They spend most of their time surfing the internet which for them was a pleasant diversion from their boring academic work. However Filo and Yang found a discrepancy in the system. Although there were plenty of interesting and ‘cool’ sites there was no proper organization system which meant that they could not find the site that they had visited again if they wanted to.

So together they decided to come up with a system or a roadmap for the internet users. They made a list of the websites they liked organizing them in topics.

Career

By November 1994 Yahoo! had more than 170,000 users per day and four years later this figure had risen to a million users a day. Many giants such as AOL, Microsoft and Prodigy offered to buy Yahoo!, but the duo refused them all. The reason was that they were not into it for the money; it was pure enjoyment that they wanted. Stanford University on the other hand was not amused by this success. Their complaints included crashing of their system and increased network traffic. So they asked David and Jerry to move off the university campus. This is when they decided to make it a proper business. They found venture capitalist Mike Moritz who invested his one million in the company. They hired a staff of school interns and friends and took up Tim Koogle as the CEO and president.

Yahoo! is currently among the most prominent internet brands and one of the most highly trafficked networks. Filo who is one of the owners of the multi-million business has changed little in his life despite the amount of wealth he has accumulated. He still drives an old Datsun to the headquarters of Yahoo! in Santa Clara, CA. He is also a generous philanthropist. Filo gave $30 million to Tulane University’s School of engineering.

Jerry Yang the Taiwanese-born American internet mogul is most famed as the founder of the Yahoo! navigational guide and the co-founder and the former Chief Executive Officer of Yahoo! Inc. He is listed in the “25 Most Influential men on the Web” and the 140th on Forbes “400 Richest Americans” list.

Childhood and Education

Yang was born on 6th November 1968 in Taipei, Taiwan. He moved to the U.S with his family at the age of 10. Yang did not know how to speak the English language however he became fluent in just three years. He attended the Sierramont Middle School and Piedmont Hills High School. He graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor and master degree in electrical engineering. 

Career

During his time in Stanford he created a website with David Filo, called “Jerry and Dave’s Guide to the World Wide Web” that was later renamed ‘Yahoo!’ The website’s immense popularity encouraged Yang and Filo co-found Yahoo! Inc. in 1995. Yahoo! began as a web portal; a directory that provided a wide variety of products and services. The website is now one of the leading most trafficked websites in the internet.

In 1999, at the MIT Technology Review TR100 Yang was named one of the top 100 innovators in the world, under the age of 35. He was CEO of the company from 2007 till 2009 though throughout this time he was very much criticized by several investors as the stock prices and revenues did not rise. The situation worsened when he refused Microsoft’s offer of buying Yahoo! for 47 billion dollars. Consequently Yang was replaced as CEO by Carol Bartz with Yang assuming his previous role of ‘Chief Yahoo’ and member of Board of Directors. In 2012 it was announced that he would leave the company along with all his responsibilities.

By 2008 the company’s shares had dropped to only 14 dollars per share. BusinessWeek listed Yang as the ‘Worst Managers of 2008’. At the time of Yang’s resignation from the board Yahoo! market capitalization was only 20 billion dollars. Despite the company’s bleak situation, Yang did play a key role in managing and developing the company’s business policies, international ventures and improving its vision. His business career and contribution to the internet media industry proves his talent as a business magnate. Presently Yang is member of the board of Cisco, Alibaba, the Asian Pacific Fund andYahoo! Japan. He also sits on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

Yang got married to Akiko Yamazaki whom he met at Stanford. She is a graduate in Industrial engineering and director at the Wildlife Conservation Network. Yang is also a philanthropist; he donated 75 million dollars to his alma mater, Stanford University which was utilized in building the ‘Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building’. With a net worth of 1.2 billion dollars, Yang is one of the richest people in the U.S. With his deep insight into the world of business, Yang has achieved a lot at a young age.

Early history ( 1994-1996). Name’s develop 

Postgraduate students of Stenford university David Filo and Jerry Yang created web-site, which was named “ Guide of Jerry through World Wide Web” in January 1994.

In April 1994 site was renamed in Yahoo!. There are two versions about appearance of name. in the first version , word was taken from Jonathan Swift’s book “Gulliver's adventures”. It means race uncivil and stupid manlike being. hold this version.
according to the second version Yahoo- is acronym, it is from phrase:” Yet another Hierarchical Officious oracle ”. URL was http://akebono.stanford.edu/yahoo. by that time , yahoo had been registered by brand mark for bbky, that’s why appel is in the end of the word.

Filo and Yang had appraised commercial potential and by 2 march 1995 they Founders have established “Yahoo!”corporation.

 The time of rapid development 

In the end of 90 –th XX century the biggest searching systems, like MSN, Lycos,Excite,and Yahoo, were developing very rapid. Number of new consumer were increased to users spent a lot of time in these portals.

8 march 1997 Yahoo! Acquired RocketMail portal. It was one of free mail service. It was the reason to appear Yahoo!Mail. Besides , yahoo bought ClassicGames.com service , which was the basement for Yahoo!Game and eGroup service , which became Yahoo!Group later. In the end , 21 July 1999 Yahoo! Realized service for rapid message changing. It was yahoo! messenger.

 Yahoo and booming of “dots-com”

7 February 2000 Yahoo was subjected to DdoS attack, and it has stoped its running for some hours. One of the most impotent event is news that Yahoo and eBay are united. But transaction did not take place, but companies negotiated about alliance 6 years later , in 2006.

Yahoo is one of many companies that could survive after “dots-com” crushed. after emerging from the current crisis, Yahoo began to work in of Telecommunications market. 3 Juin 2002 yahoo and Southwestern bell corporation ran on American market national diapul-service and 23 August 2005 Yahoo and Verizon ran on nationwide DSL-service.

In the end of 2002 Yahoo! Started to buy others searching systems such Inktomi, Overture Service AltaVista and AllTheWeb. 18 February 2004 Yahoo stoped to use searching technology Google and started to use own.

In 2005-2006 Yahoo! Ran on Yahoo!Music,Flickr and Yahoo!360 services and bought social services- blo.gs,Upcoming.org,del.icio and webjay.

Present and future Yahoo!

At present time Yahoo!Next is in beta version. It is basement of future Yahoo! Technology.

Chinese government determines the place of dissidents. 1February 2008 Microsoft offered Yahoo!’s actionnaires to buy it for $44.6 milliard.