David Filo

Who could've guessed that someone with the title "Chief Yahoo" would be worth a billion dollars? Yahoo Inc.'s David Filo, 31, is the first founder of an Internet directory to reach billionaire status, based on his holdings in the company. Yahoo's record close pushed Filo's net worth to $1.01 billion, vaulting him into an elite group with Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison and Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, 29, isn't far behind. Yahoo, the No.

Who could've guessed that someone with the title "Chief Yahoo" would be worth a billion dollars? Yahoo Inc.'s David Filo, 31, is the first founder of an Internet directory to reach billionaire status, based on his holdings in the company. Yahoo's record close pushed Filo's net worth to $1.01 billion, vaulting him into an elite group with Oracle Corp. Chief Executive Larry Ellison and Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang, 29, isn't far behind. Yahoo, the No.

What's a cyberhip parent to do? You're wary of censorship on the Internet (and you realize, unlike several headline-seeking public officials, that censorship is not likely to be effective on a medium that is international in scope and labyrinthine in nature), and you don't want to withhold from your kids the very real benefits of using the Web for research, browsing and far-flung contacts with people of other cultures.

For the very young men of Silicon Valley who got very rich very quickly during the last year and a half, one day stands distinct from the blur of midnight coding, anxiety dreams and fast-food to go. On the day their respective start-ups first sold shares to the public, or agreed to be acquired--on the day they cashed in, albeit mostly on paper--the newest generation of high-tech entrepreneurs took a few hours off.

It started out as a short, personal list of favorite sites on the Internet, the worldwide computer network. It grew, and grew some more. Within a year it had become, improbably enough, one of the most important organizing forces in all of cyberspace. And last week its keepers decided to get down to business: They collected a hefty sum from a venture capital firm, dropped out of Stanford University and began looking for office space.

For the very young men of Silicon Valley who got very rich very quickly during the last year and a half, one day stands distinct from the blur of midnight coding, anxiety dreams and fast-food to go. On the day their respective start-ups first sold shares to the public, or agreed to be acquired--on the day they cashed in, albeit mostly on paper--the newest generation of high-tech entrepreneurs took a few hours off.

Yahoo Inc. said co-founder David Filo planned to sell as many as 2 million shares of Yahoo over the next year. Filo, who founded Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo with Jerry Yang, established a plan for the sale over a 12-month period beginning in October, Yahoo said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Yahoo! Shares Priced at $13: Shares in Yahoo Inc., one of the small firms that developed an easy way to find information on the Internet, will be traded publicly for the first time today. Yahoo issued 2.6 million shares to the public, about 10% of its 25.7 million. At $13 each, the company emerges with a market value of $334.1 million.

Yahoo Inc. said Tuesday that it planned to offer unlimited e-mail storage to its roughly quarter of a billion users, starting in May. The world's biggest e-mail service is scrapping its free e-mail storage limit of 1 gigabyte, or about a billion bytes of data, responding to explosive growth in attachment sizes as people share ever more photos, music and videos. Microsoft Corp. has a free e-mail storage limit of 2 gigabytes, while Google Inc. caps its Gmail service at 2.8 gigabytes.

Pete Ellis, creator of the Auto-By-Tel Inc. online car buying service, and Jeff Leibowitz, president of Engage games online gaming service, both of Irvine, are keeping pretty good company these days. Websight magazine's second annual listing of the 100 most influential people on the World Wide Web lists Ellis and Leibowitz right there with Microsoft Inc. guru Bill Gates and Yahoo! Web server creators David Filo and Jerry Yang. Ellis, who was ranked No.

What's a cyberhip parent to do? You're wary of censorship on the Internet (and you realize, unlike several headline-seeking public officials, that censorship is not likely to be effective on a medium that is international in scope and labyrinthine in nature), and you don't want to withhold from your kids the very real benefits of using the Web for research, browsing and far-flung contacts with people of other cultures.

It started out as a short, personal list of favorite sites on the Internet, the worldwide computer network. It grew, and grew some more. Within a year it had become, improbably enough, one of the most important organizing forces in all of cyberspace. And last week its keepers decided to get down to business: They collected a hefty sum from a venture capital firm, dropped out of Stanford University and began looking for office space.

Yahoo Inc. co-founder Jerry Yang has lost about a half-billion dollars on paper after failing to regain investor confidence since taking over as the Internet company's chief executive in June. Yang, the fifth-biggest Yahoo shareholder with about 4% of its shares outstanding, has seen the value of his stake sink by about a third to $1 billion in the last seven months. Shares of Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Yahoo sank $1.76, or 8.5%, to $19.05 on Wednesday after the company late Tuesday reported an eighth straight quarter of declining profit, announced 1,000 job cuts and issued a sales forecast that fell short of analysts' expectations.

Ending an era for one of the Internet's pioneers, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang has stepped down from the struggling company's board. He also relinquished posts on the boards of Yahoo Japan Corp. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., according to a statement from the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. His surprise departure came two weeks after Yahoo hired a new chief executive, Scott Thompson, the former president of EBay Inc.'s PayPal unit. Thompson is charged with helping Yahoo catch up to Google and Facebook, which have outpaced Yahoo in the fight for Web traffic and ad dollars.