Chief Yahoo Yang an atypical executive

The 39-year-old billionaire has relished the title of Chief Yahoo that he picked up after he and friend David Filo started the Internet search company in 1995 as graduate students at Stanford University.

The loyalty he and his employees have since built with one another has helped him rebuff numerous merger overtures, including ones from Microsoft Corp. But on Friday, the Redmond, Wash., software giant offered a huge payday to Yahoo shareholders with a bid valued at $44.6 billion, or 62% above the stock's value at Thursday's close of trading.

It's an offer that puts Yang in the spotlight, a place he doesn't particularly like. He prefers to leave the chief executive role to others as he rolls up his sleeves and dives into ways to keep Yahoo on technology's leading edge.

Until last year when Yang took over the helm as Yahoo's CEO, he had just one employee reporting to him: his secretary. Now, he has 14,000. He has been fiercely loyal to his troops, a guy who struggled unsuccessfully to hold back tears as he announced Yahoo's first layoffs, in 2000.

At Stanford in 1994, Yang and Filo built a site called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web." The next year, they created a company around the website and called it Yahoo, an acronym for "yet another hierarchical officious oracle."

Later, it would also stand for "you always have other options," said Ellen Siminoff, who worked at Yahoo for six years in the 1990s. The acronym then embodied the spirit that drove Yang and others at the company, she said.

"People worked hard and ran fast because they realized they always had to stay ahead of the competition," she said. "In those days, you couldn't get your clothes on fast enough to get to work. And you couldn't find a spot in the employee parking lot on Saturdays."

As with many entrepreneurs, Yang was more comfortable in the realm of big ideas and broad strategy than the day-to-day tasks of running a company. So Yang and Filo hired Tim Koogle as the first CEO.

"People always asked me why I took myself out of the day-to-day operating responsibility," Yang said in an interview with Fortune magazine in 2000. "But that's never what I wanted to do, and besides, I knew so little about business that I didn't want to slow things down when the company began to scale up."