Case Study for Yahoo!
Brief History
Yahoo!, one of the most common top-ranked names on Fortune 500, started as merely a hobby of two students. David Filo and Jerry Yang, the original founders of Yahoo!, set up a website called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, which was later changed to the name “Yahoo!” as we know, in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on Internet. The website essentially was a directory of other websites organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. As time passed, the list became too long and unwieldy, thus they broke separated the list into different categories. And eventually when the categories became full, they broke them into more subcategories. So the core concept behind Yahoo was born.
As word spreading between friends, more and more people found out about their interesting website. Not only did it attract people in Stanford trailer, but also visitors outside of the campus. In the fall of 1994, Yahoo! celebrated its very first million-hit, which consisted of almost 100 thousand unique users. At this point, the original founders sensed that there was a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, Dave Filo and Jerry Yang incorporated the business idea and met with dozens of potential investors from Silicon Valley, and managed to get a initial investment of nearly $2 million from Sequoia Capital whose most successful investment included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco System. After securing the second round of funds and launching a highly-successful IPO, the new Yahoo has been growing rapidly and, eventually, became one of the largest Internet companies as we know.
Starting the business as the search engines and web directories company, Yahoo! Inc. has now become a leading global company in Internet communications, commerce and media that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to people worldwide. As the first navigational guide website, Yahoo! is the leading guide
Yahoo!, one of the most common top-ranked names on Fortune 500, started as merely a hobby of two students. David Filo and Jerry Yang, the original founders of Yahoo!, set up a website called “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, which was later changed to the name “Yahoo!” as we know, in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on Internet. The website essentially was a directory of other websites organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. As time passed, the list became too long and unwieldy, thus they broke separated the list into different categories. And eventually when the categories became full, they broke them into more subcategories. So the core concept behind Yahoo was born.
As word spreading between friends, more and more people found out about their interesting website. Not only did it attract people in Stanford trailer, but also visitors outside of the campus. In the fall of 1994, Yahoo! celebrated its very first million-hit, which consisted of almost 100 thousand unique users. At this point, the original founders sensed that there was a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, Dave Filo and Jerry Yang incorporated the business idea and met with dozens of potential investors from Silicon Valley, and managed to get a initial investment of nearly $2 million from Sequoia Capital whose most successful investment included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco System. After securing the second round of funds and launching a highly-successful IPO, the new Yahoo has been growing rapidly and, eventually, became one of the largest Internet companies as we know.
Starting the business as the search engines and web directories company, Yahoo! Inc. has now become a leading global company in Internet communications, commerce and media that offers a comprehensive branded network of services to people worldwide. As the first navigational guide website, Yahoo! is the leading guide