DAVID FILO

Place of birth    : Moss Bluff, Louisiana, United States of America
Places lived    : Wisconsin
Net Worth    : $2.9 Billion USD (2006)

David Filo, 43,  is an American businessman and the co-founder of Yahoo! with Jerry Yang. He is credited with helping build Yahoo! into the world’s most highly trafficked Web site and one of the Internet’s most recognized brands.

When the Yahoo company conducted its initial public offering in 1996, Filo and Yang both became millionaires. Their shares eventually were worth billions. Yahoo! quickly grew to include other Stanford alumni and Filo and Yang developed software to help categorize websites even further. The site grew even more and became a stable for online searches. Hundreds of companies jumped on board to advertise on their site and helped the company to grow to over one hundred employees in a short time. The growth was simply exponential!

In 2000, Filo continued to oversee the technological development of Yahoo! and still owns roughly eight percent of its stock. In 2006, Filo was estimated to be worth $2.9 billion, ranking him the 240th richest person in the world. As the head of technology, Filo is largely responsible for creating many of Yahoo’s innovations, including its main sources of revenue.

“Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful.”

“We’re not in this for the fast money. Really, what we want is to be part of this industry.”

“First of all we had very few users. We might have had a hundred accesses a day. So there was really no demand from the users to add their own links. Things changed over time though as our access rates doubled every month. Through word of mouth on the Net more and more people began using it.”