David Filo

Last updated
David Filo
David Filo.jpg
Filo in 2007
Born
David Robert Filo [1]

(1966-04-20) April 20, 1966 (age 57)
Wisconsin, U.S.
Alma mater Tulane University
Stanford University
Occupation(s) Co-founder and Chief Yahoo, Yahoo! Inc.
SpouseAngela Buenning
Children1

David Robert Filo (born April 20, 1966) is an American billionaire businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with classmate Jerry Yang. His Filo Server Program, written in the C programming language, was the server-side software used to dynamically serve variable web pages, called Filo Server Pages, on visits to early versions of the Yahoo! website.[ citation needed ]

Contents

Early life

Filo was born in Wisconsin and was raised in Moss Bluff, Louisiana. He earned a B.S. degree in computer engineering at Tulane University (through the Dean's Honor Scholarship) and an M.S. degree in 1990 at Stanford University. [2]

Career

In February 1994, he co-created with Jerry Yang an Internet website called "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web", consisting of a directory of other websites. It was renamed "Yahoo!" (an exclamation). Yahoo! became very popular, and Filo and Yang realized the business potential and co-founded Yahoo! Inc. [3] [4]

Yahoo! started off as a web portal with a web directory providing an extensive range of products and services for various online activities. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s. It is still one of the leading internet brands and, due to partnerships with telecommunications firms, is one of the most visited websites on the internet. [5] [6]

Personal life

Filo is married to photographer and teacher Angela Buenning, a graduate of Stanford (1993) and Berkeley (1999). [7] They have one child, and live in Palo Alto, California. [2]

In 2005, he gave $30 million to his alma mater, Tulane University, for use in its School of Engineering. [2]

The Filos have been major benefactors of both Stanford, especially its schools of sustainability and education, and Berkeley, primarily its graduate school of journalism. [8] [9] [10]

As of September 2019, Forbes estimated Filo to be worth $4.3 billion, ranking him the 379th-richest person in the world. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James H. Clark</span> American computer scientist and entrepreneur

James Henry Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in computer graphics led to the development of systems for the fast rendering of three-dimensional computer images.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Yang</span> Computer programmer and co-founder of Yahoo!

Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc., which he started with classmate David Filo in 1994.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tulane University</span> University in New Orleans, Louisiana, US

Tulane University, officially the Tulane University of Louisiana, is a private research university in New Orleans, Louisiana. Founded as the Medical College of Louisiana in 1834 by seven young medical doctors, it was turned into a comprehensive public university as the University of Louisiana by the state legislature in 1847. The institution became private under the endowments of Paul Tulane and Josephine Louise Newcomb in 1884 and 1887. The Tulane University Law School and Tulane University Medical School are, respectively, the 12th oldest law school and 15th oldest medical school in the United States.

Yahoo! is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon Communications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo! Inc. (1995–2017)</span> American technology company

The original incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. was an American multinational technology company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Yahoo was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was incorporated on March 2, 1995. Yahoo was one of the pioneers of the early internet era in the 1990s. Marissa Mayer, a former Google executive, served as CEO and President of Yahoo from 2012 until June 2017.

<i>Forbes</i> American business magazine

Forbes is an American business magazine founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917 and owned by Hong Kong-based investment group Integrated Whale Media Investments since 2014. Its chairperson and editor-in-chief is Steve Forbes, and its CEO is Mike Federle. It is based in Jersey City, New Jersey. Competitors in the national business magazine category include Fortune and Bloomberg Businessweek.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Battelle</span> American entrepreneur, author and journalist

John Linwood Battelle is an entrepreneur, author and journalist. Best known for his work creating media properties, Battelle helped launch Wired in the 1990s and launched The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom. In 2005, he founded the online advertising network Federated Media Publishing. In January 2014, Battelle sold Federated Media Publishing's direct sales business to LIN Media and relaunched the company's programmatic advertising business from Lijit Networks to Sovrn Holdings. He later started NewCo Platform, an "inside out" events company that allowed attendees to visit "new kinds of companies" in more than a dozen cities around the world. In 2019, he co-founded The Recount, which was sold to The News Movement in 2023.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Craig Newmark</span> American entrepreneur, Craigslist founder

Craig Alexander Newmark is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist best known as the founder of the classifieds website Craigslist. Prior to founding Craigslist, he worked as a computer programmer for IBM, Bank of America, and Charles Schwab. Newmark served as chief executive officer of Craigslist from its founding until 2000. He founded Craig Newmark Philanthropies in 2015.

Yahoo! Search is a search engine owned and operated by Yahoo!, using Microsoft Bing to power results.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Ma</span> Chinese businessman and investor (born 1964)

Jack Ma Yun is a Chinese business magnate, investor and philanthropist. He is the co-founder of Alibaba Group, a multinational technology conglomerate. In addition, Ma is also the co-founder of Yunfeng Capital, a Chinese private equity firm. As of June 2023, with a net worth of $34.5 billion, Ma is the fourth-wealthiest person in China, as well as the 39th wealthiest person in the world, ranked by Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

David Ross Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Search engine</span> Software system that is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web

A search engine is a software system that finds web pages that match a web search. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of hyperlinks to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories and social bookmarking sites, which are maintained by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Any internet-based content that cannot be indexed and searched by a web search engine falls under the category of deep web. Modern search engines are based on techniques and methods developed in the field of Information retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Augustin</span> Businessman (born 1962)

Larry Augustin is a VP at Amazon Web Services. He formerly was the chairman of the board of directors of SugarCRM. He is a former venture capitalist and the founder of VA Software. During the height of the dot-com bubble, Augustin was a billionaire on paper at the age of 38.

Yahoo! started at Stanford University. It was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were Electrical Engineering graduate students when they created a website named "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In April 1994, Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed "Yahoo!". The word "YAHOO" is a backronym for "Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle" or "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle." The yahoo.com domain was created on January 18, 1995.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy Koogle</span> American executive (born 1951)

Timothy Andrew Koogle is an American executive who served as the first CEO and president of web company Yahoo! between 1995 and 2001. He served as the company's chairman from 1999 to 2003. He was named to the Top 25 Executives of the Year by BusinessWeek in 1999 and 2000.

Srinija Srinivasan was hired in 1995 as the fifth employee of Yahoo! by founders Jerry Yang and David Filo to "organize the content." Srinivasan left Yahoo! in 2010 while serving as a vice-president and editor-in-chief. Srinivasan co-founded music start-up, Loove.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bobby Murphy</span> Filipino-American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer

Robert Cornelius Murphy is a Filipino-American Internet entrepreneur and software engineer. He is the co-founder and the CTO of the American multinational technology and social media company Snap Inc., which he created with Evan Spiegel and Reggie Brown while they were students at Stanford University.

Altaba Inc. was a non-diversified, closed-end management investment company based in New York City that was formed from the remains of the first incarnation of Yahoo! Inc. after Verizon had acquired old Yahoo's Internet business. Verizon completed its acquisition on June 13, 2017, and put the assets under a new subsidiary named Yahoo! Holdings within its newly created division, Oath. After the transaction, Yahoo! Inc. had no operating business but retained its cash holdings, partnership investments and bond portfolio, as well as certain patents that Verizon did not purchase. It reorganized as an investment fund and changed its name to Altaba Inc. on June 16. The only Yahoo! - branded interest held by Altaba was its stake in the joint venture Yahoo! Japan, which it sold to the SoftBank Group in late 2018.

The Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability is a school at Stanford University focusing on climate change and sustainability. The school also researches many domains of fossil fuel extraction and development. It opened on September 1, 2022, as Stanford's first new school since the School of Humanities and Sciences in 1948. It is considered one of the largest climate change–related schools in the United States.

References

  1. Centennial Year Commencement Exercises, Stanford University, June 16, 1991, p. 69, archived from the original on December 22, 2019, retrieved June 26, 2018
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Forbes profile: David Filo". Forbes. Retrieved 21 March 2021.
  3. Yahoo! Inc. – Company History. yhoo.client.shareholder.com
  4. McCracken, Harry (2019-10-17). "Deleting Yahoo Groups will leave a permanent stain on Yahoo's legacy". Fast Company. Retrieved 2019-11-11.
  5. Alex Gray (April 10, 2017). "These are the world's most popular websites". World Economic Forum. Retrieved July 5, 2018.
  6. "Most Popular Sites 2012: Alexa Ranks The 500 Most-Visited Websites," Huffington Post, August 9, 2012
  7. Another billionaire drops Archived December 5, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
  8. Amy Adams and Anneke Cole (May 4, 2022). "Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, university's first new school in 70 years, will accelerate solutions to global climate crisis". Stanford University.
  9. "UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism Announces New Advisory Board". Berkeley Journalism. March 4, 2017.
  10. "David and Angela Filo". 18 August 2021. Archived from the original on 2022-11-14.