If you search Yahoo! for Jerry Yang, you'll only come up with five hits, one of which is his home page - last updated in 1995 (though it does have a link to Yahoo). He's been kind of busy since then, working to build a multi-billion dollar business from what started out as a simple list of his favorite Internet sites. In 1997 he was already ranked No. 32 on Forbes technology's richest list.

In 1994, Yang was studying for his PhD in computer engineering at Stanford. In typical student fashion, Yang spent a great deal of time surfing the Net. Back then, the World Wide Web was a tangled mess, so Yang and his buddy, (fellow student) David Filo, took it upon themselves to bring some order to chaos. They created a list of links to their favorite sites, dubbed "Dave and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web." The pair e-mailed the URL to a few friends, and everything snowballed from there. People sent submissions for sites to add to the list, and pretty soon, Yang and Filo were spending 40 hours a week reviewing sites and adding links. The number of visitors to their site increased at an exponential rate. Soon, their PhD advisor advised them to move their little hobby off campus - it was clogging up the university's computer system. By February of 1995, after fielding offers from a number of venture capitalists, they finally accepted a $1 million offer from Sequoia Capital. Shortly thereafter, they abandoned their academic pursuits to concentrate on the business. The company went public in April 1996, and as of late 1998 was valued at more than $20 billion.

Yang and Filo hired Tim Koogle, another Stanford engineer, to be the company's CEO. Filo took the title of Chief Technical Officer, while Yang has focused on business strategy and public relations. As "Chief Yahoo," Jerry Yang is truly the public persona of the company.

One might say he's the ultimate procrastinator. He not only found a way to make a living fooling around the web, he now employs people to do it all day. At Yahoo headquarters, which looks more like a playground than the office of one of new media's most important businesses, he personally manages a staff of more than 100 "surfers" who review sites from all over the world and manually index each site under a complex framework categories and sub-categories. (Other search engines, like Lycos and Excite, use computer programs and algorithims to index every word on each web page.)

~ Yang says the company is modeled the company after Einstein's dictum to "make everything as simple as you can, but not simpler than that." And this no-frills approach to searching the Net seems to have a lot of appeal. Yahoo is the most popular search tool on the Web, with an index of about one million sites. Between 15 and 25 million visitors visit Yahoo each month.