"Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. As it became more popular, it became pretty clear we would have to get more people involved." ~ David Filo
According to Nielsen/NetRating, Yahoo was the world's most-visited web site in June 2000 with 62.8 million unique users, ahead of America On-line (57.2 million) and MSN (47.8 million).
Acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," Yahoo was founded by two Stanford students working on their PhD dissertations in 1994, Jerry Yang and David Filo.
"We began to index all of the information we were finding on the Web just for fun," explained billionaire Yang. "You could call it a hobby, you could call it a passion. Call it instinct. But it wasn’t really business. We weren’t making money doing it, and we were actually forsaking our schoolwork to do it."
Yahoo soared. The first portal to build a global empire, Yahoo has 18 overseas offices in 12 languages. With savvy marketing, the site is one of a handful of household internet names. In 1999, with healthy profits, they snapped up Broadcast.com ($5.7 billion) and GeoCities ($4.3 billion).
About the key to success, businessman Jimmy Dean once advised, "For true success ask yourself these four questions: Why? Why not? Why not me? Why not now?"
Organize and see what you can build.