By Pinaki Ghosh
Yahoo success story
In the year1994 when Internet was in its early days, two good Electrical Engineering students and also friends from the Stanford University, who were great buddies and loved surfing the net, from their campus trailer, pursued their liking of adding names of websites to the list of their favorite sites that they had come across. The list never stopped and kept growing. When the list grew very long, they made headings and subheadings to manage it. This list was soon made available on the internet for other people who had the interest and their site started off with the name, Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web. Jerry Yang and David Filo loved the name Yahoo which had a dictionary meaning as ‘rude, unsophisticated, uncouth’ as it went with their mood. Yahoo is also an acronym for ‘Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.’ David and Jerry favorites’ list became a big success, and by November 1994 they had already more than 1 million viewers visiting their site!
Filo and Yang soon understood the huge potential business waiting for them, and went forward and approached several Venture Capitalists in order to expand their business. It never was an easy task for these two students who had with no business experience in order to arrange for finance. Ultimately they succeeded in convincing Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Sequoia Capital (Venture Capitalist of Apple, Atari, Cisco and Oracle) who agreed to finance them with $2 million in April 1995 and Yahoo.com took off to an amazing start The two friends were extremely quick witted to hire a proper management team with Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell’s WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. Yahoo then started with the new high profile work force in April 1996 comprising of a total of 49 employees. Yahoo then had its initial public offering on April 12, 1996, raising $33.8 million, by selling 2.6 million shares at US$13 each.
Today “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” is the top global internet communications, commerce and media company serving over 345 million users every month across the globe. Now it offers the multiple solutions like instant messaging, free email service, search engine, news, advertising, gaming, streaming audio-video, hosting solutions, social connection building (Yahoo 360 degrees) and lots more. It too has different sites according to the different countries. Yahoo has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and US; with headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008 at 10:29 am and is filed under Ebay, Internet Marketing, Making Money on the Internet, Small Business, Uncategorized, Woman Entrepreneur, customer service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
