Jerry Yang

Age: 38

Board Afflilations: Cisco Systems, Incorporated (CSCO)

WHAT HE DOES
Since the departure of former chief executive Terry Semel in June, Jerry Yang has served as C.E.O. and chairman of Yahoo. Previously, Yang, the company’s co-founder, acted as Yahoo’s public face and served on its board of directors, helping develop business strategies and guide the direction of the global brand.

WHAT HE’S KNOWN FOR
Yang turned his downtime hobby into a full-time pursuit, and it made him a billionaire in the process. In 1994, he was spending long hours in a double-wide trailer that functioned as an office at Stanford University, where he and fellow engineering graduate student David Filo were a study in procrastination. Instead of working on their theses, they devoted themselves to indexing their favorite links and posting them on a website.

Soon, people well beyond their circle were accessing the site, and by the fall of 1994, it had logged about a million hits in six months. Yang and Filo knew they were onto something big, and with venture capitalists swarming around Silicon Valley, the lure of reaching millions of people via the Web versus the 100 or so who would read their dissertations proved irresistible. Six months away from finishing his thesis, Yang took a leave of absence, from which he has yet to return.

The following year, Yang and Filo turned their primitive directory into Yahoo. Yang’s playful sense of humor came through in the choice of the company’s name: It was meant to poke fun at the liberal use of acronyms in the tech world. Yahoo stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but it was also a shout-out to the “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth” yahoos in Gulliver’s Travels.

Yang, seldom photographed without an exuberant smile, quickly became a poster boy for the internet age. He and Filo were plastered on magazine covers wearing dotcom-casual attire—jeans and optional ties. Yahoo’s initial public offering in 1996 made Yang a millionaire, but he didn’t act like one. He and his brother Ken still had dinner at their mother’s on Sundays, taking home leftovers to eat during the week.

Now Yang has cashed in some of his wealth—retaining a stake of $1.4 billion—and he’s starting to give it away. He and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki, pledged $75 million to Stanford University earlier this year for the construction of an environmental studies building and a training center for doctors.

WHERE HE’S FROM
Born in Taiwan, Yang was brought to the U.S. by his mother when he was 10. He received a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford but has yet to finish that Ph.D.

WHERE HE’S GOING
Yang isn’t expected to remain in the C.E.O. position for long, although the company hasn’t announced any plans to bring in a professional manager, as it did with former Warner Bros. chief Semel. —Beth Kwon