Mr Yang in India -- Yet Another Hyped Overseas Offering?

Mr Yang in India -- Yet Another Hyped Overseas Offering?
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

MUMBAI, JUNE 30: Decades after a baby-faced Bollywood actor enthralled Indian audiences with his junglee cry of Yahoo!, a school-boyish Taiwanese American is here these days to capture the eyes, hearts and minds of the Indian cyberati with an alpha-portal that is beginning to envelop the world.

Yahoo! may or may not hack through the thicket of indigenous websites that have mushroomed in recent months, but its gargantuan rise as a universal media company is instructive of life in the time of the Internet.

At its peak early this year, Yahoo! was valued at more than $ 100 billion, twice the size of the Pakistani economy, and more than the combined worth of Disney and Boeing. Its ubiquitous portal generated some 300 million page views each day, more than the viewership of Oprah or Ally McBeal. As a brand name, Yahoo! is up there with Coca-Cola or McDonalds.

All this in just five years.

No one could have foreseen this in the fall of 1994 when two young Stanford graduates began fooling around on the primordial WorldWideWeb as a distraction from the more serious business of completing their dissertation. In the early days of the Internet, Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang and David Filo were typical Silicon Valley ubergeeks intrigued by the possibilities offered by a browser called Mosaic, forebear to the famous Netscape.

The first home page they constructed included such epic entries as Jerry's golf scores and David's favourite music. Soon they were compiling lists of their pet sites -- there were only a few hundreds at that time. Hyperlinking and arranging them by subjects, they arrived at a portal they called "Jerry and David's Fast Track to Music."

Mosaic evolved into Netscape and the Internet exploded. Thousands of websites bloomed. As two of the earliest webheads, Jerry and David worked frantically to slap together sites under different heads -- news, health, sports, economy, business etc -- with the rather naive patronage of Netscape, which appeared not to have realised the potential of what the boys were doing.

They called the portal Yahoo!, after the hooligans in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. But typical of the quirks that came to be their hallmark, they claimed it stood for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo). Their page views rose from a mere 100,000 in 1995 to a million in 1996. By the time Netscape and AOL cottoned on to the game, put their portal boots on, and offered to buy them out for $ 1 million per head, Yahoo was halfway across the world logging tens of millions of hits. (If Netscape bought them, the joke went that the new company would be called Netanyahoo.)

Yahoo!'s growth thereafter from a private hobby to a public gorilla is the stuff of Silicon Valley legends. When Jerry and David first approached the region's venture capitalists for funding, they were laughed out (Change the name, was a frequent advice). They were even rejected by Kliener Perkins, the Michael Jordan of VC firms. The firm's far-sighted Indian partner Vinod Khosla had already committed to back a rival operation called Excite.

Yahoo! finally found its first million in funding from Sequoia Ventures. It would become the most profitable million ever invested, multiplying ten thousand times into more than $ 10 billion within five years. When Yahoo! launched its IPO in April 1996 at an offer price of $ 14, it opened at $ 23 and zoomed to $ 43 before closing at $ 33. Mind you, this was in the days before VCs were throwing money at kids with business plans on paper napkins and the Internet was still the realm of geeks.

Next morning, the San Jose Mercury News, chronicler of the Valley's Net rush, headlined the story, "Yahoo! Yeehaw! Or should that be Yikes?"

Yahoo!'s success in Silicon Valley is proof of the new economy mantra that timing and speed is everything. Named after a mythical people, it might just have been christened after the equally fictional place and called Serendip.com. Yahoo! arrived at the right place at the right time. But its founders also had the right instincts.

It also inspired a legion of wannabes, including Hotmail's Sabeer Bhatia, a contemporary of Yang and Filo at Stanford who beat the celebrated duo in the e-mail sweepstakes. Another Indian link at Yahoo! is its chief of content, Srinija Srinivasan, one of the company's earliest recruits and now among its top honchos. "Ninja," as she is known, joined Yang and Filo after meeting them during a Far East trip in 1994 during which she impressed them with her knowledge of Japanese and her expertise in the field of artificial intelligence.

The key figure behind Yahoo!'s Brobdignagian strides though is the fresh-faced co-founder Jerry Yang, who goes by the whimsical title Chief Yahoo (to which the tight-fisted David Filo is said to have designated himself Cheap Yahoo). A Taiwanese immigrant, Yang is a master communicator who is equally fluent in Mandarin and English, and who has wowed Wall Street analysts with his verve and vision. Today, when he visits his native Taiwan, he is provided with an official motorcycle escort.

Mumbai greeted him on Wednesday with a traffic snarl. That may be the very reason why Yahoo! and the Internet could make unimaginable progress in India. Recent surveys show that Internet usage in India could jump from a mere million today to more than 10 million by 2003. Reason enough for the Chief Yahoo to brave the monsoon and the manic traffic.