The Roots
Yahoo! bubbled up in 1994 as a hobby for Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. The duo wanted to help their friends find the best of the Web, navigate the vast expanse of information, more easily discover what they were looking for, and even stumble upon something delightful that they didn’t know to look for. The pair’s vision and passion turned into a curated Internet directory that became known as "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web."
Yahoo! bubbled up in 1994 as a hobby for Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. The duo wanted to help their friends find the best of the Web, navigate the vast expanse of information, more easily discover what they were looking for, and even stumble upon something delightful that they didn’t know to look for. The pair’s vision and passion turned into a curated Internet directory that became known as "David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web."
The Guide proved to be so useful that soon thousands of people relied on it. In March 1995, David and Jerry incorporated their wildly popular hobby as a business named Yahoo! Inc. A month later, Yahoo! received funding from Sequoia Capital, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that’s legendary for investing in technology successes.
That year, David and Jerry thought it’d be a good idea to take a leave of absence from Stanford, work on Yahoo! full time, and hire 24 employees to pioneer how consumers experience the Internet. Today the company headquartered in Sunnyale, California, has more than 13,000 employees across 25 countries, provinces, and territories.
Yahoo! has evolved into a leading global brand that combines innovative technology with a human touch to create engaging and meaningful experiences that keep you entertained, productive, and informed. Whether it’s feeding your hunger for the content you love, connecting you to the people and communities you care about, or helping you discover things you didn’t even know you were
looking for. Yahoo! makes it easy to enjoy what matters most in your world and the world around you – every day, at home, around the globe, and across the screens of your life.
looking for. Yahoo! makes it easy to enjoy what matters most in your world and the world around you – every day, at home, around the globe, and across the screens of your life.
The Yahoo! experience makes the digital world personal. It mirrors your passions and interests – and empowers you to get more from the Web so you can get more out of life.
The Name
How many other Fortune 500 companies possessed the pluck to include an exclamation mark in their names? Yahoo! exudes passion and finds lots of ways to live up to its fun-loving roots. The exclamation point always reminds us of that.
David and Jerry actually found the name Yahoo! while flipping through the dictionary during their days as Stanford students. The name refers to the book Gulliver's Travels and describes people who are brutes, crass, and rude. This tongue-in-cheek reference typifies the sense of humor we Yahoos have about ourselves. We like to have fun and don’t take ourselves too seriously.
Trivia aficionados might also know that at the company's inception, David and Jerry made Yahoo! into an acronym. It stands for:
Yet
Another
Hierarchical
Officious
Oracle
Another
Hierarchical
Officious
Oracle
Fun, isn’t it?
