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Yahoo! chair at Stanford founded

Copyright © 1997 Nando.net
Copyright © 1997 The Associated Press

STANFORD, Calif. (Feb 14, 1997 2:01 p.m. EST) -- The founders of Yahoo! are the youngest people to endow a chair at Stanford University, a $2 million thank you to the school where they developed the idea for the company that made them rich.

Jerry Yang, 28, and David Filo, 30, are worth about $140 million each as a result of their Internet directory company, which went public last spring. Despite their youth and that of Yahoo!, they decided it was time to give something back.

"We're still very young; we have a lot of time ahead of us," Yang said. "But we had the fortune to succeed with what we love. We feel it's part of our mandate to foster that next generation."

The chair endowed by Filo and Yang is called the Yahoo! Founders Professor of the Stanford School of Engineering. Stanford trustees approved the name on Wednesday.

"We were delighted to have the 'Yahoo!' in the name," said Laura Breyfogle, spokeswoman for the School of Engineering.

Yang and Filo were working on their doctorates in computer science at the School of Engineering when they started making a list of their favorite sites on the Internet's World Wide Web. The two -- working at night, dining on pizza -- turned the list into an extensive guide to the Web.

One night, they started searching the dictionary for a name for their list. The word yahoo -- meaning a rude, uncivilized person -- jumped out. Filo and Yang decided it should be an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle."

Yahoo! receives more than 20 million "hits" a day. It went public last year at $13 a share. It closed on Thursday at $35.88 on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Yang and Filo dropped out of the Ph.D. program to start the company. They praised Stanford for letting them take their pet project with them, no strings attached, even though it was developed there.

"A lot of other schools would have probably tried to either keep it themselves or to take a chunk of it," Filo said. "Stanford's goal has been to set up a great environment where people can be creative.

"They said, 'Do what you want and good luck,"' he added. "We feel obligated to give back to them."


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