Personality of the month - Jerry Yang

25/02/2008

With the hottest topic in the search world being the potential merger of Yahoo! with a number of organisations, this week's personality of the month is one of the founding fathers of the beleaguered search engine - Jerry Yang.

Born in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, on November 6th, 1968, Yang moved to San Jose, California at the age of ten with his mother and brother. He claims that when he arrived in the States he only knew one word of English, "shoe" but by the time he was 13 he had mastered the language and was referred to an advanced placement programme that offers college level courses in high schools.

Jerry then went on to graduate from Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's and then master's degree in electrical engineering.

In 1994, while at Stanford he created, along with David Filo, a website that consisted of a directory of other sites. This was initially given the name, "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web" but was later renamed Yahoo!, from the book Gulliver's Travels, meaning, rude, unsophisticated and uncouth!

As this directory became ever more popular with users, Yang and Filo grasped the business potential of their creation and co-founded Yahoo!! Inc in 1995, a year after the initial launch. Famously, they both took leave from their college research programmes and are still on indefinite leave from their PhDs.

Although a US citizen, Yang is proud of his ethnicity and considers himself a "Chinese American". He is married to Akiko Yamazaki, whom he met at a Stanford sponsored conference in Kyoto in 1992. In February 2007, Jerry Yang and his wife pledged $75 million to Stanford University, their alma mater, the bulk of which would be dedicated to the construction of a new environmental building on campus.

As well as being CEO of Yahoo!! Jerry is currently on the Board of Directors of Alibaba, the Asian Pacific Fund, Cisco and is also on the Stanford University Board of Trustees.

 

Read Financial Times interview with Jerry Yang