Quotes of the Day

In 1995, I became fascinated with the new websites popping up during the early days of the Internet. One of them was http://akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo. Created by two Stanford students, Dave Filo and an expat Taiwanese named Jerry Yang, the site was a directory of other websites, organized as a list of useful topics. It was meant for the students' friends, but everyone was hungry at that time for a guide that helped make sense of this chaotic new medium, so Yahoo! quickly became essential for all Web users. Soon we heard that America Online was interested in acquiring Yahoo! for a small sum that would seem quaint today. Yang (who was born in Taipei but moved to San Jose at age 10 with his widowed mother) rejected AOL's offer. Instead, he took a venture-capital investment and followed his dream.

It was a bold step, but Yahoo! was already on its way to becoming the next great Internet company after Netscape. Unlike Netscape, however, Yahoo! was not a software company. It was a media company. Access was free. Advertising paid the bills. I was inspired by this. With partner Jack Smith, I started my own Internet company, Hotmail — a free, Web-based, ad-supported e-mail system that quickly became the world's largest e-mail service provider. In 1997, Microsoft purchased Hotmail for $400 million.

Many doubted the Internet could be a useful vehicle for commerce. But Yang and his fellow Yahoos ignored the naysayers and built the world's most-trafficked website, which today has annual revenues of roughly $6 billion. Thank you, Jerry, for showing us the way.

• Sabeer Bhatia
• How a student from Taiwan brought Yahoo! to the world