Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang: From the tech bubble to the age of AI

Great to see you, Brian. Congratulations on 100.

Oh gosh. Thanks for having me, by the way, and happy New Year. It's 2025, and I'm sure everybody's already figured out that this is the square year and everything else. But it is a milestone year for Yahoo as well. We became a company in 1995, so this will be, coming up in March, 30 years of Yahoo. When you talk about how time flies with 100 episodes, I can't even imagine that Yahoo as a company is 30 years old. And yes, those early days were crazy. As you all know, David Filo and I started the company when we were still graduate students at Stanford University. In those early days, without VC funding yet, we were definitely taking turns sleeping under desks. It was crazy because it really felt like we caught an internet wave — the wave of the web — and that wave was just pushing us. We had to grab the tiger by the tail, whatever analogy you want to use. It was just a rush. David would probably tell you it seemed like a blur, but at the same time, we were quite awake, really trying to be responsive to this crazy world that we never knew would have existed. We all live with the internet, and especially as technical people, we dealt with the internet, but when the web came along, it really became this mass tool for the masses where you can point and click and use hyperlinks. All of a sudden, instead of typing commands, you were able to use your mouse to get around. I know I sound like a really old person saying all this, but truly it was revolutionary. You just saw content pop up around the world literally overnight. We didn't know where it was going to go, we didn't know there was a business model, but we were like, 'Wow, this is going to be big.'

Yeah, Brian. I was the front-end guide and David was the back-end guy. The web page was technically called 'Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web' for a few months. Then I annoyed David by calling it 'David and Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web,' and that's when David said, 'You know what, I do not want my name on this thing. We better come up with a new name.' It was one of those late-night all-nighters where we said we had to come up with a new name that was easier to remember, easier to type, because we were dealing with so many requests from people that were typing in our URL and everything else. Yahoo really stood out for a couple reasons, but primarily if you look it up in the dictionary, these were characters from Gulliver's Travels — subhuman, very rude, very uncivilized people that were subservient to the horses. So we decided to call ourselves Yahoos. It was probably the cheapest branding exercise ever created, but it created some value in the brand.

Well, first of all, it's very difficult for companies to endure. Those of us who watch technology companies come and go quite a bit — it's something that David and I take a lot of pride in, even though we're not day-to-day at Yahoo anymore. Two ways: one is the culture that we built the company around, which is based on trust and building teams. We were really gratified with people who were supremely talented and wanted to push towards the same goal. When you're able to do that as a team, there's no better feeling — everything kind of comes together in a dramatically unplanned way. The second thing around the culture is this belief that with great people, you can achieve things that you probably didn't think about before. One of the things that's been fun is through 30 years, we've worked with some really great people. The diaspora of Yahoo in the industry has been a lot of fun. We still have a lot of friends and ex-colleagues doing great things in life. Watching those people go out into the world and do great things has been really fun too. I do think keeping that culture — not taking ourselves too seriously, having fun — you'll remember David and my titles were Chief Yahoos. We didn't give ourselves really serious titles. After a while, David, because he was running a lot of our expenses, became the Cheap Yahoo. We really tried to create an environment where hierarchy is not the key that makes everything run; it's really this idea of teamwork and trust and building a great brand and great product as the most important thing. We used to have these surfers and people who were editorial content generators that were incredibly important as part of our company, deciding what the voice of Yahoo was. Those people were not necessarily managers or higher-ups in terms of management titles, but they were incredibly dedicated and became the soul of the product, really shining through our brand. Giving people a chance to come up with ways to use the internet to speak to other people — that was something that developed. As users gave us feedback, there was an affinity to the brand. Maybe you guys still see it today: people talk about Yahoo and there's a closeness, a level of trust, and a level of fun that we were able to achieve that maybe other brands weren't. I can't tell you why that is; I think we were just very lucky.

I think there is a lot of joy if I net it all out. A lot of people have analogies like having kids or whatever, but it is a lot of highs and lows. When we're able to create something that has endured and a brand that has continued to affect people in a positive way, the feeling of joy, accomplishment, and pride is really what ends up. But it is difficult. There's no straight line from zero to success. That's something that entrepreneurs, leaders, and company builders all go through. As I always say, it's never linear. You have these moments building a company, whether in the beginning with some decisions, or in our case going public very early on — that was a decision whether we wanted to be a public company. Along the way, product decisions, branding decisions, partnership decisions — some were difficult, some were up and down. But ultimately, when you can make decisions together with a group of people you trust and have gone through the journey together, that makes it a lot easier. You can come and look around the room and say, 'Look, we're going to make a tough decision,' and live with it. That's true for every company, not just Yahoo. We've been fortunate in that we've had terrific people along the way and a lot of good luck. I always joke you're probably talking to somebody that's had some of the best luck. I just think I've been really lucky to be an immigrant, to go to Stanford, to start Yahoo, and to have been a venture capitalist for the last 10 years. But at the same time, we all work really hard to be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities we've had. For Yahoo's journey, even though there's been a lot of ups and downs, we look at it with a lot of pride and hope that people like you continue to make it great. I'm rooting for the product. I always joke — people ask, 'Do you still have a Yahoo Mail address, Brian?'

I do. The problem is, over a certain age limit, people have Yahoo email addresses; people who are younger don't. That's a challenge. We need to figure out how to get Yahoo Mail popular again for the young people.

I think we've seen a few waves of technology. As we talked about, Yahoo was in that first wave of the web becoming the dominant form of internet content. Even throughout, we've seen commerce, mobile, social networking, online to offline. With each one of these waves, the internet has gone through this hype cycle. People talk about 'Oh my gosh, this is going to be the next greatest thing,' then you cross the chasm and come to the other side. I think the AI wave is coming, maybe it's upon us depending on who you talk to. It is similar to past waves in some ways and very different in others. Similar in that we have this opportunity to figure out how quickly it's going to come. For example, in the year 2000, we had this huge bubble in the internet and tech sector. That was the infrastructure bubble — Cisco was the most valuable company, Yahoo was one of the more valuable companies for no apparent reason other than the stock market driving it up. Then the bubble busted, and it took a few years before valuations, users, and infrastructure caught up to the hype. There's some of that in AI today in terms of infrastructure buildout. But I also think this wave does materialize when all this buildout becomes real. It's going to be really game-changing. That's the difference this time: everybody who is not a technology person can probably imagine what happens with AI. So the guessing game, partly as investors and technologists, is not if but when. We said this for mobile too, and for social. The trick is figuring out how long it's going to take for AI to really become real, and who the winners are — big companies, little companies, innovative companies, or established companies. Everybody's chasing it. It's exciting. We were talking about the city of San Francisco — if you go now to certain parts of the city, it's AI Central. The amount of talent, people putting capital, resources, and energy into AI is astounding. It's going to be part bubble, but the reality is also going to be really incredible. One thing that has been a little different this time, especially in context of Yahoo, is when we were building the company and the internet was being built, there was really no playbook. It was the Wild West — figuring out what advertising looked like, what content looked like, what the rules were, what editorial rules looked like. Now, with what happened with social media, the government, and how the internet has affected our lives from democracy to our basic political systems, I think people are more mindful of what AI means to society than 30 years ago. These guardrails people are starting to think about — how do we use technology for good, how do we make sure humans are in charge of the technology — those are still things everybody's figuring out. But it feels like we're more in lockstep with the technology development than 30 years ago, where parts of the technology were running way ahead of where society was aware.

Generally speaking, my simple rule of thumb is this: when things are moving really fast and innovating in the beginning, I think the government should learn, observe, and understand, but not regulate. But when the technology does get to a point where it's affecting a lot of people and there is a gap — for example, people who have technology and using it versus people who don't, or people who are affected one way or another — anytime when you have a gap in any sort of equity or social situations, that's when the government needs to play a role. The challenge, as you point out Brian, is AI is going to move way faster than every other previous technology. The question is can the government keep up learning, can they really observe fast enough to step in when these gaps start to show up? We're going to have AI haves and have-nots, just like we had internet access haves and have-nots, just like we have people who have the ability to learn and be educated to be better positioned in society when you use AI properly, and people who don't have access to that. Those are situations where government will need to play a part. But the key is to have people in government and regulator roles who understand the stuff. We need great technologists who are willing to be part of government, not just in the commercial sector.

I hope so. I'm an investor in very early stage, and as I like to joke, I'd love to find the next two founders in a garage kind of thing. That's something we keep looking for. I do think there are opportunities, whether it's AI or other innovative sectors. We're watching this quantum computing craze.

Yes, yes, that I am.

It feels like it. But if you look at Rigetti and Chad, who started the company with a dream of figuring out how to commercialize cloud-based quantum computing — 10 years ago when we invested, it was crazy. It's still a long ways from being everyday technology. But the point of that example is there are going to be opportunities like this even with AI today. Yes, you have big companies like Nvidia, Google, and OpenAI, but there are just great companies that emerge, especially around data sets that may or may not be totally public, or they have unique data sets they can generate on their own, and AI really helps them. But I do think there is a bit of this buildout bubble or buildout craziness happening. It feels like people are putting a ton of capital into a lot of infrastructure for AI. There's a bit of the 'build it and they will come' idea.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.