Today we will lead you to a new world, the kingdom of Yahoo.com. It is of the most important players in the history of the Internet and possibly one of the largest existing portals which is inspired by the story of two young entrepreneurs.
How Yahoo.com Was Started
In the spring of 1994, Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen founded Mosaic Communications. At that time Jerry Yang and David Filo were just two recently graduated electrical engineering students who were looking for a job. In a busy office, located at the campus of Stanford University and not far away from the laboratories where Sun Microsystems, Cisco, and Silicon Graphics had once started, Yang and Filo used to spend their afternoons devoted to surfing the Web. Filo was the one who discovered the existence of the Mosaic browser shortly after it had appeared on the Internet. They were both very attracted by the new browser as it made their surfing a lot smoother and easier. In order to keep track of all the visited pages by topic, they made their ‘Jerry’s fast track to Mosaic‘. It was divided into hierarchical topics such as News, Health, Science, Arts, Recreation, Business, and Economics. This made it easier for people to find something even if they didn’t exactly know what they’re looking for.
Yahoo Inc. – Logo
It was something new back then as most of the other websites that existed were structured differently – as a searchable index of pages. “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” – a better looking and more organized version of “Jerry’s fast track to Mosaic” was actually the first version of what we call today Yahoo. it was mostly text, devoid of flashy graphics and flashing icons. He was armed by hand, including searches of Web pages that otherwise needed time to locate.
The Mosaic browser, created by Andreessen and his friends from Illinois, was the product of fine technology and ultimate design features. What Yang and Filo actually did was to create an expanded directory that Mosaic users could use to have a well organized browsing experience. Back then the young entrepreneurs were very surprised by the fact that nobody had ever thought of compiling the information in this way of what’s out there on the Internet.
‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web‘ became a well-known name such as Wal-Mart. But this name, even that it had other shorter versions like “Jerry Yang’s Guide to the WWW”, was a very long one and not the easiest to remember. This was why Yang and Filo decided to substitute all these names with something much more shorter and more suitable for humans’ perceptions. This was how, in 1994, Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed to Yahoo. This was an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, also a word that was unique, short and easy to remember. The very first web address (URL) of the portal was: “akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo“. The name also meant “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” which much well described what the site was back then and this was another reason for Jerry and Dave to pick up the name.
The domain name yahoo.com was registered in January, 1995. A couple of months later, after realizing the huge potential of the portal, Yang and Filo incorporated Yahoo as a company. This was how today’s most famous web directory had been created.
Both Yang and Filo received a lucrative offer from a group of investors who were willing to give one million dollars for Yahoo!, but they rejected the proposal because they were sure that they would go further and establish a proper business model. This turned out to be one of the wisest decisions they had made and Yahoo would become one of the most successful companies in the field of technology in the next few years. Later other directories appeared on the Internet: Lycos, Infoseek, Architext, WebCrawler, some of which were more suitable for certain searches, but none of them managed to reach the number of followers of Yahoo.
Yahoo’s Founding and Growth
Started in January, 1994. Just in a couple of months, Yahoo’s traffic surpassed 100,000 “hits” per day in late 1994 and they started only with several thousand per day at the start of the official launch of the site. Yang and Filo could safely say they created more activity on the Web than anyone else in the world and this was done with zero marketing. As usually happens with successful companies and brilliant ideas, what began as a hobby transformed quickly into a concern. In the spring of 1995, Sequoia Capital, a venture capital company invested in Yahoo! 2 million dollars for a 25% stake in the company. According to these numbers, Yahoo was worth $ 8 million. This proved to be the best deal in the history of Silicon Valley in these times. After Yahoo! began trading on the stock market, the value of a million dollars became almost $ 8000 million in early 1999. Millions can become billions only in the magic ambiance of the Valley.
It was more and more clear to Jerry and Dave, that their company had nice potential, but none of them knew how to run a company successfully and reach it. They decided to hire professional managers to take the helm. Tim Koogle was hired as the CEO and Jeffrey Mallett as the COO. Now with trained captains on board, the business was ready to go beyond borders. In 1996 Yahoo! went public making a successful initial public offering (IPO) of shares
Yahoo! gradually promoted the brand. Many US citizens still did not know about the company and this provoked Yang and Filo to invest $ 5 million in advertising and marketing campaigns. It was normal for one to see at the football stadium: “Do you Yahoo?” or “You Yahooiza?”.
Welcome once again to the “always the same story in Silicon Valley”, because once again as always in the Valley, a company, established by graduate students is a result of something “accidentally” or “without thinking of the future” and ends with a business for billions of dollars. This is what we call being at the right time, doing the right thing.
Do you believe in miracles? Start fulfilling your projects right now and, who knows, the next successful history in high tech might be yours!
Yahoo Today
Today Yahoo! Inc. is a public company and its shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This means that anyone can buy a part of this great enterprise, which is cool, isn’t it? Currently, the price of one share is around $16 and this means that the whole company is worth around $20 billion. Yahoo is one of the most popular Internet media in the world providing many valuable free and paid services like yahoo mail, yahoo finance, yahoo messenger, yahoo weather, and many others. More than 350 million different people use Yahoo’s sites every month.
If you need some more information about this great company, you can find such by visiting yahoo.com, or info.yahoo.com. For financial information go to https://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=YHOO
Check some other cool startup articles:
Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream Was Started With Just $12000, See Their Start-Up Story
History of Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) – A Start Up Story Of David Warthen & Garrett Gruener
Starbucks – The Start-Up Story Of Jerry Baldwin, Gordon Bowker, and Zev Siegl Who Created A Coffee Empire
The Amazing Start Up Story Of Imgur And Alan Schaaf
The Start Up Story Of Eric Xu and Robin Li – How Baidu.com Was Founded
Talent Trail’s Story – A College Start-Up By Sydney Liu and Ryan Choi
Alphabet Inc’s (Google) History – The Start Up Story of Sergey Brin And Larry Page
The Start Up Story Of Craiglist.org And Its Founder Craig Newmark
