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Yahoo! founders thank alma mater with endowment
March 6, 1997
Web posted at: 4:30 a.m. EST
From Correspondent Greg LefevrePALO ALTO, California (CNN) -- Three years ago, Jerry Yang and David Filo were doctoral students in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. They hacked together a new sort of Web page -- a catalog of the World Wide Web, complete with search engine. They called their creation Yahoo!, supposedly an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."
It caught on. So much so, in fact, that Stanford noticed the strain on its network, and strain on the students' time. Netscape founder Marc Andreessen offered space on his company's servers, and Yahoo! struck out on its own.
"The biggest struggle was giving up something that we'd been doing for five or six years of doing our PhD's and almost being there," Yang remembers.
Yahoo! was supported first by private investors, then by a stock offering that has left Filo and Yang worth about $120 million each.
The pair hasn't forgotten Stanford's early support. "Certainly, Yahoo! wouldn't exist without the sort of environment Stanford gave us to allow us to create it," Yang says.
"We owed them something in return," Filo adds.
"Something" came in the form of a $2 million donation to endow the "Yahoo! Founders Professor of the Stanford School of Engineering", a permanent research chair. Filo, 30, and Yang, 28, are the youngest people ever to do so. Filo also donated $1 million to Tulane University, where he got his bachelor's degree.
The money doesn't seem to faze Filo and Yang, but the responsibility sometimes does. Yahoo! now employs 170 people to find, catalog, and describe Web sites, and expects 6 billion "hits" this year. "Internally, we say to people, 'you always have other options,'" Yang says. "If we don't act on what people want to see, they always go somewhere else."
Though Yahoo! has become an actual company, and its founders real live tycoons, the atmosphere at the Santa Clara offices is anything but corporate. Filo and Yang do business in offices that resemble dorm rooms, complete with milk crates and laundry.
And they have little patience for formal layers of management and conference rooms. "We do a lot of management in the hallways," says Yahoo! CEO and President Tim Koogle. "I can walk into anyone's cube and say 'Hey, let me bounce something off of you.'"
And in the hallways or the cubicles, shoes are often optional.
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