Jerry Yang finally decided he could run Yahoo!

I met Jerry back in December 1994 at the Internet World show we ran at the Washington Hilton. Yahoo! had lost its use of the Stanford servers and approached my company (at the time Mecklermedia) to get space on our servers. We struck a deal but very quickly (within 24 hours) Jerry and his partner David Filo decided to place the young Yahoo! on the servers of a rising star called Netscape.

Early on Yahoo! brought in Tim Koogle to be CEO and then, of course, Terry Semel.

I always wondered what Jerry saw in these people. I am sure they were fine business people but I always felt Jerry could have done better than any hired hand. Koogle made a bundle and Semel did even better.

I think Semel got a lot of credit for doing very little. He happened to land at Yahoo! at the time they bought Overture. Overture turned out to be the guts of Yahoo's growth. It was a great time to be CEO as keyword search exploded and any CEO of a search company became brilliant overnight.

Semel should have left about 18 months ago, but it would have been tough to give up the huge option packages he was getting from the Yahoo Board of Directors.

Now it is crunch time for Yahoo! and the new captain is the founder of the company. Perhaps Jerry will be able to pull a "Steve Jobs a la Apple" and bring back the glamor and originality that Yahoo! had from 1994 until 2002.