Back in what is commonly referred to as ‘the day’, a couple of Stanford grads put their heads together over some White Castle burgers and came up with a brilliant plan to create a guide to the world wide web.
(OK, I have no independent confirmation that White Castle burgers were present, but it makes the story sound even more authentic.)
Anyhoo, Jerry Yang and David Filo may not have been Harold and Kumar, but they definitely started something. In 1994 they renamed their self aggrandizing guide Yahoo, and the second largest search engine was born.
They talk about the early days on the Yahoo blog:
After many late nights and a lot of pizza, we decided to take the big leap, turn our hobby into a business, raise money and devote ourselves totally to building a company. This was no sure thing. For example, 15 years ago, we wanted a free service that was ad-supported. But the conventional wisdom was that our business needed to be subscription-based. Few people thought that advertising could be the key revenue generator for the Internet. Of course, the conventional wisdom was wrong and so today we know that August, 1995, the month our first ad went live, was a critical milestone in the history of Yahoo!, as well as the history of the internet.
They are also hosting a Twitter challenge:
- We’re starting the Yahoo! Birthday Twitter Trivia Challenge in a few minutes-here are the details http://bit.ly/aO3Y8A #Y15
As a bit of history, on Flickr where a snapshot of the Yahoo timeline can be seen, a commenter showed this bit of Yahoo history:
Happy Birthday, Yahoo!