Jerry Yang

Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang (born Yang Chih-Yuan; November 6, 1968) is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist.

Yang was born Yang Chih-Yuan in Taipei, Taiwan, on November 6, 1968; his mother was a professor of English and drama and his father died when he was two, by which time Yang had a brother.

In 1978, his mother moved the family to San Jose, California, where his grandmother and extended family took care of the boys while his mother taught English to other immigrants.

After moving to the US, Yang took the American name Jerry; his mother, Lily; and his brother, Ken.

He says that he only knew one English word, "shoe", when he came to America, but became fluent in English in about three years.

Yang graduated from Piedmont Hills High School and went on to earn both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University in four years.

He met David Filo at Stanford in 1989, and the two went to Japan in 1992 for a six-month exchange program, where he met his future wife, Akiko Yamazaki, also participating in the exchange program.

Yang founded Yahoo!

Shi had used a Yahoo email address to anonymously notify a pro-democracy website in the US that the Chinese government had ordered the Chinese media not to cover the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 on June 4.

He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc., which he started with classmate David Filo in 1994.

Yang has a net worth of $2.5 billion.

in 1994 and served as CEO from 2007 to 2009.

He left Yahoo!

While studying at Stanford in 1994, Yang and David Filo 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." Yahoo!

received around 100,000 unique visitors by the fall of 1994.

In April 1995, Yahoo!

received a $2 million investment from Sequoia Capital, 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 of 1995 from Reuters and Softbank.

It went public in April 1996 with 49 employees.

Yang met Alibaba founder Jack Ma in 1997 during Yang's 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.

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 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.

had cooperated with Chinese authorities in the arrest of Chinese journalist Shi Tao in November 2004.

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 the fall 2005, a month after the Alibaba investment, news broke that Yahoo!

Terry Semel, who replaced Tim Koogle as CEO after the dot-com bubble crash, served until 2007 when the rise of Google led the board to fire him and appoint Yang as interim CEO.

in 2012.

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."

He founded a venture capital firm called AME Cloud Ventures and, as of 2015, serves on several corporate boards.

According to Rob Solomon, a venture capitalist at Accel Partners, Yang was "a great founder, evangelist, strategist and mentor," having "created the blueprint for what is possible on the Internet."