Jerry Yang

He is married to Akiko Yamazaki, a Japanese woman, who he met while studying at Stanford University, in the Kyoto overseas program in 1992. Akiko has a degree in industrial engineering and is a director with the Wildlife Conservation Network.

He was born as Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang, on November 6, 1968, in Taipei, Taiwan. When he was two, his father died. At the age of ten, he moved to San Jose, California, with his mother, Lily, and younger brother, Ken.

Although his mother served as an English teacher, he could only speak Chinese and was very weak in English. He was placed into an Advanced Placement English class where he learned and mastered the language.

Later he was admitted to the Sierramont Middle School and Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose, from where he received his early education. He then went to the Stanford University and simultaneously earned a bachelor’s as well as master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1990.

While studying for his doctorate, he met David Filo, with whom he shared an office at the Stanford University. At that time, the Internet had just been introduced, and both the young men soon became hooked to the new technology and often spent hours surfing on the net.

Gradually they realized that it was difficult to navigate on the web because it was a mishmash of uncategorized data. To overcome this problem, they designed software that organized the web pages by subject, and launched their own website, called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web."

Within months the site was attracting thousands of people who were looking for a way to locate their favorite web pages. Because the site was visited so often, they decided to change the site name to something a little simpler and fun, renaming it to “Yahoo”.

Although they received offers for selling the company, the duo retained ownership of their creation, and continued to work to make Yahoo an even better search engine. In 1995, the pair was offered financial backing to start their own company.

Realizing the worth and importance of their creation, they dropped their studies six months away from finishing their doctoral theses, and instead incorporated ‘Yahoo! Inc.’ in March 1995.

His most significant and greatest work is that of co-founding the ‘Yahoo! Inc.’ which started off as a “web portal with a web dictionary” and evolved into a website that provides an extensive range of products and services for online activities. At present, ‘Yahoo!’ is one of the leading Internet brands and is one of the most visited sites on the Internet.