Accomplished Chinese American

Jerry Yang 

Occupation: Chief Yahoo! and Director 
Date of Birth: 1968 
Place of Birth: Taiwan 
Year immigrant to US: 1978 

	Jerry Yang, a Taiwanese native raised in San Jose, California, co-created the Yahoo! Internet navigational guide in April 1994 with David Filo and co-founded Yahoo! Inc. in April 1995. Yang, a leading force in the media industry, has been instrumental in building Yaboo! Into the world's most highly trafficked Web site and one of the Internet's most recognized brands. Being officially called one of the "Chief Yahoos," Yang is member of Yahoo!'s board of directors and guide the future direction of the company. 
 
	Yahoo!'s success in large measure is being the first company to provide Internet users with a way of getting around the world Wide Web efficiently. By late 1993, both Yang and Filo noticed that, rich and diverse as the World Wide Web was becoming, it was almost impossible for a user to know the breadth of what was actually out there. Academics like them would especially benefit from a directory of research papers at other universities. So the two went to work building software that could organize Internet sties into categories. Yahoo!is essentially a catalog of Web addresses, so after it was quietly launched in April 1994, it make search for information on Internet infinitely easier. Yahoo! stands for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,"  

	Along the way they made Yahoo stand out from the throng of other so-called Web portals, coming up with snappy versions of Internet e-mail and online chat and shopping. Given Yahoo's huge popularity - 100 million people browse its offering monthly - it's no stretch to say that Jerry and Dave's company, as much as any other, fomented the Internet revolution. 

	But it's the numbers that really tell the story. Yahoo has a market capitalization of more than $70 billion. Yang and Filo are each worth $7.5 billion. In 1999 revenues more than doubled to $588.6 million and the company posted a profit of $61.1 million. Yahoo has planted local operations in 15 countries and has five times as many regular visitors as AOL has subscribers.  

	Jerry Yang was born Chih-Yuan Yang in Taiwan in 1968, and was raised by his mother, Lily, a teacher of English and drama, after his father died, when Jerry was two. At the age of 10, he emigrated with his younger brother, Ken, and their mother and grandmother to the United States, and together they settled in San Jose, California.Despite their mom's English proficiency, the only word that Jerry and his brother understood when they arrived on American soil was "shoe." But they picked up a language easily. "We got made fun of a lot at first. I didn't even know who the faces were on the paper money," Yang recalls. "But when we has a math quiz in school I'd always blow everyone else away. And by our third year, my brother and I had gone from remedial English to advanced-placement English." 

	Yang excelled at Piedmont Hills High School, and he wasn't just a nerd either. He was class valedictorian, he played on the tennis team, and he was elected student body president his senior year. On the side he managed to take the equivalent of his freshman year college course load. 

	Not surprisingly, he won scholarship to every college he applied to, including US Berkeley, Stanford, and Cal Tech. He settled on Stanford so that he could remain close to his family, even though he'd have to work part-time t make ends meet. Just as important, Stanford was the only one of the three that didn't require him to pick a major during freshman year. "I thought I wanted to be an electrical engineer, which I turned out to be.," he says. "But I was always curious about other things, too, and what if I got interested in history of the law?" Or, for that matter, business...  

	Yang kept up his breakneck academic pace at Stanford. In four years he completed not only his BS in electrical engineering but a master's degree as well.  

	All the while he juggled on-campus jobs, including a stint as a book sorter and shelver in the university library. "That's where I first learned about how systematically in formation was categorized - you know, the Dewey decimal system and all that." 

	Jerry Yang just shrugs his shoulders when asked how it feels to be the founder of what has become an icon of the Internet age. "Maybe in a few years we'll be better at this, but at the moment it's really hard for us to objectively evaluate ourselves. I'm very afraid to have Yahoo placed in a historical context this soon, because I don't think we've done it yet. The Yaboo story is still being written."