Jerry Yang Biography
Jerry Yang is a Taiwanese-American Internet entrepreneur, engineer, and programmer. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc. He is listed in the “25 Most Influential men on the Web” and the 140th on Forbes “400 Richest Americans” list.
He moved to the U.S with his family at the age of 10. Yang did not know how to speak the English language however he became fluent in just three years.
Jerry Yang Age
Yang was born on November 6, 1968, in Taipei, Taiwan. He is 54 years old.
Jerry Yang Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of 2.7 Billion dollars as of 2023.
Read More:Richard Fairbank Bio, Age, Wife, Net worth, Foundation, MasterCard, School Of Public Health, Career
Harold Hamm Biography, Age, Net worth, Entrepreneur, Political involvement, Philanthropy, Speech
Peter Lynch(Investor) Bio, Age, Education, Family, Learn to Earn, Investment Philosophy, Best Books
Bill Gates Biography, Age, Family, Height, and Net Worth
Education
He graduated from Sierramont Middle School and Piedmont Hills High School in San Jose and went on to earn a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University, where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi fraternity.
Jerry Yang Wife
Yang is married to Akiko Yamazaki, a Japanese woman who was raised in Costa Rica, whom he met in 1992 during a 6-month Stanford exchange program when they were both students there.
Jerry Yang Children
Jerry and his wife have two children but they have not disclosed their names yet. They have remained very private about their personal life.
Jerry Yang Alibaba
Yang met Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 1997 during his first trip to China. Ma, a government-employed tour guide and former English teacher, gave Yang a tour of the Great Wall of China.
The two hit it off and discussed the growth of the Web, and Ma created Alibaba several months later. A 1997 photo of Yang and Ma at the Great Wall still hangs on the wall in Alibaba’s Hangzhou office.
In 2005, under Yang’s direction but before he took over as CEO in 2007, Yahoo! purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion plus the assets of Yahoo! China, valued at $700 million. In 2012, Yahoo! sold a portion of its stake in Alibaba for $7.6 billion.
The company made an additional $9.4 billion in Alibaba’s 2014 IPO. Eric Jackson, the founder of hedge fund Ironfire Capital, called Yahoo!’s investment in Alibaba “the best investment an American company has ever made in China,” and stated, “Jerry deserves enormous credit for that.
Jerry Yang And David Filo
While studying at Stanford, Yang and David Filo were involved in a project to create computer chips using computer-aided design. Time and again, Filo and Yang would find a site that interested them, then would be unable to locate it the next time they logged on.
Frustrated at their inability to keep track of the good places they’d visited, Filo and Yang came up with the idea to provide a kind of road map for online users.
They put together a list of their favorite sites, organized them into topics, then designed a search engine that made finding the right site as simple as typing in the right keywords.
in 1994, they co-created an Internet website called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” which consisted of a directory of other websites. As it grew in popularity they renamed it “Yahoo! Inc.” and dropped out of Stanford.
They also made themselves multimillionaires in the process. Yahoo! received around 100,000 unique visitors by the fall of 1994.
In April 1995, Yahoo! received a $2 million investment from Sequoia Capital and Tim Koogle was hired as CEO, and Yang and Filo were each appointed “Chief Yahoo”.
Yahoo! received a second round of funding in the Fall 1995 from Reuters and Softbank. It went public in April 1996 with 49 employees.
In 1999, Yang was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.
Terry Semel replaced Koogle as CEO after the dot-com bubble crash and he served until 2007 when the rise of Google led the board to fire him and appoint Yang as interim CEO.
Jerry Yang Yahoo
In 2005, Yahoo co founder Jerry Yang pulled off what would be one of the greatest strategic investments in tech history: he arranged for Yahoo to spend $1 billion for a 40% stake in fledgling Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba.
Ironically, the Yahoo sale became an inevitability not in spite of Yang’s amazing Alibaba heist, but because of it. Yahoo’s core business of news, email, and advertising technology has been in a steady decline for years, as the company missed out on the search, social, and mobile waves.
But there would be no impetus to sell, abandoning Yahoo’s independence, if not for the Alibaba stake.For over a year now, as Yahoo continued to slide into irrelevancy in Silicon Valley, the company tried in vain to find a way to realize a tax-free gain on its Alibaba shares.
The stock went up or (mostly) down based on updates to that strategic alternatives plan, rather than the forgettable quarterly results.
CEO Marissa Mayer tried in vain to reorient the business around mobile apps, video advertising, and social networking opportunities but none of that was more than a footnote to investors.
Youtube
Jerry Yang Philanthropy
In February 2007, Yang and his wife gave $75 million to Stanford University, their alma mater, $50 million of which went to building the “Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Environment and Energy Building”, a multi-disciplinary research, teaching and lab building designed with sustainable architecture principles.
In late 2012 and early 2013, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco exhibited selections from the Chinese calligraphy collection belonging to Yang and his wife.
He began the collection in the late 1990s; it contains about 250 pieces. These selections also appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 2014 exhibition “Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy.”
In September 2017, Yang and Yamazaki pledged $25 million to the Asian Art Museum, the largest donation in the museum’s history.