What Happened on January 17th

Amidst pressure from investors and other board members, Jerry Yang resigns from the board of Yahoo!, a company he co-founded. Yang, who served as the company’s CEO from June 2007 to January 2009, started Yahoo! with David Filo in 1994 while both were graduate students at Stanford University. Initially created as a web directory, Yahoo! grew quickly and became one of the most popular web portals in the late 1990s. In a move supported by Yang, Yahoo! rejected a multi-billion offer from Microsoft to take over the faltering corporation. A few years later, Yahoo! was worth less than half of Microsoft’s acquisition offer.