David Filo - Co-founder of Yahoo

A graduate of Tulane University with a Master's degree from Stanford, David Filo co-founded Yahoo with Jerry Yang while they were ... thumbnail 1 summary

A graduate of Tulane University with a Master's degree from Stanford, David Filo co-founded Yahoo with Jerry Yang while they were both graduate students in 1994. Originally a website called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," it was simply a directory of other websites organized in a hierarchy rather than a searchable list. A few months later they renamed the site Yahoo, and the site caught on; Yahoo was incorporated the following year, and went public in 1996, raising nearly $34 million. Because "Yahoo" was already trademarked as a barbecue sauce, the company had to be referred to as "Yahoo!" with an exclamation point; the distinction has not generally caught on with the public.

Over the course of the 90s, Yahoo diversified in response to the dotcom bubble and the enormous amount of activity on the internet; it acquired the company Four11 and its webmail service Rocketmail, which became Yahoo! Mail, just as ClassicGames.com became Yahoo! Games, and eGroups mailing lists became Yahoo! Groups. Yahoo also acquired webhost GeoCities and launched Yahoo! Messenger to compete with AIM and other services. Unlike a lot of online companies, Yahoo altered the terms of service for services it acquired -- often asserting intellectual property rights for content on their servers (causing a commotion when they acquired GeoCities, making users worry that Yahoo would suddenly claim to own anything hosted on their web pages).

Though they closed at an all-time low after the dotcom bubble burst, Yahoo was one of the few major survivors of the 90s, and has former partnerships with fellow survivors such as Google and eBay in the years since.