Yang, for many, may be an unfamiliar name.
But 20 years ago, in the eyes of today's Internet giants such as Jack Ma, Ma Huateng and Zhou Hongyi, Yang Ishiyuan is the deserved king of the entire Internet world, and the market value of Yahoo he led once exceeded $125 billion, the gap is too big to look up.
In 2005, Yang Jerryyuan packaged $1 billion and all the assets of Yahoo China to Ma Yun in exchange for a 40% stake in Alibaba, when Ma Yun's Taobao network was in full swing with eBay and eBay and eBay, while the newly launched "Alipay" business was a gold-devouring monster.
This 1 billion US dollars has solved Ma Yun's urgent needs.
On October 20, 2021, in the double eleven pre-sale event, Taobao's two top anchors Li Jiaqivia won a transaction volume of 18.9 billion yuan in one night, about 2.9 billion US dollars.
The $1 billion that once saved Ma Yun from water and fire is now less than 1/2 of Taobao's overnight turnover.
And the king Yang Jeryuan, who once made the entire Internet world look up, finally fell to the altar after some fatal mistakes.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="126"> Yahoo!</h1>
In 1990, at the age of 22, Cherne Yang was admitted to stanford University's electrical engineering department with honors, and it was at this time that he met another founder of Yahoo, David Ferro.
During his studies at Stanford, Yang also worked part-time in the school library, and his work seemed very boring in the eyes of ordinary people, sorting out books according to the type.
One day, while chatting with Jerry Yang, David Ferro mentioned the trouble of finding content on the Internet, which is rich but unrelated to each other and very difficult to retrieve.
Yang Zhiyuan told David Ferro that it would be much easier to find content and resources to find content and resources like in the library, and put the same type of content on a site.
So the two relied on the school's network platform to search the whole network and sorted out the famous "World Wide Web Guide".
In the spirit of sharing, but also a show off psychology, Yang Put this "World Wide Web Guide" in Stanford's BBS.
After the release of the World Wide Web Guide, it caused a sensation in the BBS, and everyone rushed to share the guide with their friends, so in just one year, the page traffic of the World Wide Web Guide exceeded 1 million.
You know, the number of Internet users in the United States in 1993 was able to exceed 3 million.
What is even more ridiculous is that because the "World Wide Web Guide" is set up on Stanford's campus network, the huge number of visits once dragged down the running speed of the Stanford intranet, so the school conveniently swept the World Wide Web Guide out of the door.
The World Wide Web Guide is not only sought after by the majority of netizens, but also favored by capital.
After being swept away by the school, Silicon Valley Sequoia Capital approached Jerry Yang and David Ferro and offered to invest $4 million to support them in building a new website.
In fact, there is an anecdote here, when naming the new website, Yang Jerry originally wanted to use the English surname "Ya" as the starting letter of the name, but after going through the entire dictionary, he did not find the right phrase.
Yang Jerry, who was a little disgusted, suddenly remembered that there was a word "Yahoo" in "Gulliver's Travels", which was a crude, low-level humanoid monster in the story, with various human vices.
This was originally a kind of self-deprecation of Yang's long-term "idleness", but the two discussed for a while, thinking that the Internet world is full of young people who like new things anyway, and a serious word may not be as interesting as this derogatory word.
The two agreed to use "Yahoo" as the name of the future website, and in order to increase the emotional color, they deliberately added an exclamation point, which led to the later "Yahoo!" ”。
In April 1995, Mr. Yang founded Yahoo with $4 million.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="127" > the youngest Chinese billionaire</h1>
From the establishment of Yahoo to the listing of Yahoo, it took 12 months, no more, no less, exactly one year.
On April 12, 1996, Yahoo went public on nasdaq at an issue price of $13 per share, and the stock price had soared to $33 by the close of the day.
And what complements this stock is the speed and scale of Yahoo's business.
As the world's first portal, Yahoo aggregated a variety of content that was of interest to netizens at the time, search engines, stocks, maps, chat rooms, news, weather forecasts, mailboxes, which were not only interesting, but also free.
This is GhierRy Yang's business model: free content + commercial advertising, attracting users through a large amount of high-quality free content, and then selling ads to advertisers.
Do you think this game is very familiar, yes, and to this day the entire Internet is basically following this model, still not outdated.
Shortly after the launch of this game, Yahoo's average daily visits exceeded the sum of its competitors, and after its listing, it quickly crushed the mainstream search engine Infoseek at that time, and by the end of 1997, Yahoo's average daily visits had reached 90 million.
In January 2000, taking advantage of the spring breeze of the millennium, Yahoo users exceeded the 50 million mark, the average daily visit exceeded 200 million, and the stock price rose to $475, with a total market value of 120 billion yuan.
How exaggerated Was Yahoo at that time, so to speak, the market value of Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, and Heinz's three Fortune 500 companies combined was not as high as Yahoo.
As the founder, Yang Zhiyuan also became the youngest super-rich man in China with a net worth of $10 billion.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="133" > bad luck</h1>
To make it perish, you must first make it crazy, and Yahoo has almost become the best footnote to this sentence.
Yahoo was founded in 1995 with an investment of $4 million, and by five years later, its market value had reached 120 billion yuan, a 30,000-fold increase!
Its speed of development is terrifying, but after the turn of the millennium, it seems that heaven has abandoned Mr. Yang, so much so that he has made several particularly fatal business decisions.
In 1997, the founder of Google once took the initiative to find Yahoo and expressed his willingness to sell its search engine technology for 1 million, but at that time, Yahoo's traffic had been riding away from friends, and the refusal was quite crisp.
In 2002, the rise of Google began to threaten Yahoo's dominance in search engines, so Yang again approached Google's two founders for a $3 billion purchase.
Google considered it and said that it was possible to increase by half a billion US dollars, but it did not think that this request directly annoyed Yahoo, and the acquisition negotiations could not be concluded.
As of this writing, Google has a market capitalization of $1.85 trillion.
In 2006, Yahoo and fackbook launched acquisition negotiations, Yahoo bid 1 billion yuan, Facebook CEO Zach Burke agreed.
Yang Zhiyuan took a look, you Facebook promised so cheerful, think it is not expensive to buy, so he repented and asked for a $850 million acquisition.
Zuckerberg was a 22-year-old young man at the time, and even if he could bear this insult, he would not talk about it.
As of this writing, Facebook has a market capitalization of $915.2 billion.
The same plot was staged again in 2008.
At that time, Yahoo's business had shown a downward trend, Microsoft proposed an offer to buy Yahoo for $40 billion, Yang felt less, and Microsoft increased the price to $47.5 billion.
As a result, Yang Zhiyuan is still too little, saying that there is no $53 billion to talk about, so Microsoft will not talk about it.
As we all know, with the overall decline of various businesses, Yahoo sold to US telecom giant Verizon for 4.83 billion yuan in 2016.
In a later interview, in the face of the host's questions about the above-mentioned acquisition offer, Yang Zhiyuan said with a bitter smile: bad luck.
Of course, it is this Yang Zhiyuan, who expressed his bad luck, invested $1 billion in Jack Ma in 2005, and if the shares were not sold later, the return on this investment is about $200 billion today.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="135">
</h1>
In 1996, a huge billboard stood on the corner of Zhongguancun Street in Beijing that read:
"How far Chinese is from the information highway - 1500 meters north"
On the other side of the sea, 28-year-old Yang Jerry Yang brought his first product "yahoo!" Listed on nasdaq ringing bells.
In the past 20 years, the situation has changed.
In 2017, after being acquired by telecom giant Verizon, Yahoo announced a change of name to Altaba.
This former forerunner, this Internet veteran, this Yahoo that brought the first memories of a generation of Chinese netizens at the turn of the century, completely dissipated into the wind.