History of Yahoo inc.

The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, started their student hobby in a campus trailer in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet. Before long they were spending more time on their home-brewed lists of favorite links than on their doctoral dissertations. Eventually, Jerry and David's lists became too long and unwieldy, and they broke them out into categories, then subcategories…and thus the core concept behind Yahoo! was born.

The Web site started out as "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web" but eventually received a new moniker with the help of a dictionary. The name Yahoo! is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," but Jerry and David insist they selected the name because of its definition: "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth."

Before long, hundreds of people were accessing their guide from well beyond the Stanford trailer. Yahoo! celebrated its first million-hit day in the fall of 1994, translating to almost 100,000 unique visitors. In April 1995, Sequoia Capital agreed to fund Yahoo! with an initial investment of nearly $2 million. Realizing the new company had the potential to grow quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in the Fall 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo! launched a highly-successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

And the rest is history…Now, more than ten years later, Yahoo! continues to grow its talent and audience with 12,000 Yahoos (employees) and more than 500 million unique visitors.