Jerry Yang

Jerry Yang is a Taiwanese-American internet entrepreneur who in 1994, with his Stanford classmate David Filo, co-founded Yahoo!, one of the foundational companies of the early commercial World Wide Web. He was born Yang Chih-Yuan on November 6, 1968, in Taipei, Taiwan, and emigrated with his widowed mother and younger brother to San Jose, California, in 1978 at age 10. He spoke almost no English on arrival but earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University by 1990.

While working on a doctorate in electrical engineering at Stanford in early 1994, he and Filo began compiling "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web," a hierarchical directory of websites that they hosted on Stanford university servers. The directory was renamed Yahoo! — a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" — in April 1994, and incorporated as Yahoo! Inc. in March 1995 with venture-capital funding from Sequoia Capital.

Yahoo! went public on April 12, 1996, in one of the most-watched IPOs of the early-internet era, and through the late 1990s became the most-trafficked website on the World Wide Web. He served as Chief Yahoo and director, and from June 2007 to January 2009 as chief executive officer, during which period he rejected Microsoft's unsolicited 44.6-billion-dollar acquisition offer in May 2008 — a decision widely criticized by Yahoo! shareholders given the company's later decline.

He left Yahoo!'s board in January 2012 and in 2014 co-founded the early-stage venture-capital firm AME Cloud Ventures. He has served on the boards of Alibaba Group, Lenovo, Workday, and Cisco. He and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki, donated 75 million dollars to Stanford in 2007, the largest individual gift the engineering school had received at that time.

His name Jerry is a short form of Jerome, from the Greek Hierōnymos, combining hieros meaning "sacred" and onoma meaning "name" — that is, "holy name." He adopted Jerry as his American given name after emigrating to California, while retaining Yang Chih-Yuan as his Chinese name.