April 20, 1966 — David Filo Was Born

One of the first billionaire tech entrepreneurs, co-founder of Yahoo, and co-creator of one of the first mass internet search platforms.

David Filo studied at Stanford. It was there that he met Jerry Yang, with whom he would later create Yahoo. In the early 1990s, Stanford was one of the centers of Internet development, and many IT companies first appeared as student projects inside the university.

In 1994, Filo and Yang started building a simple website with links to interesting pages on the Internet. They called it “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” They maintained the list manually and classified the pages by topic.

It is worth remembering that the web at that time was still very young (about three years old), so two people could realistically create a high-quality catalog of Internet pages.

From this project, a commercial company, Yahoo, naturally emerged. Inside the company Filo worked on the technical architecture of the product. It became one of the first large-scale internet search platforms and a global media portal, and its creators had to solve technical problems that no one in the industry had faced before.

During the dot-com boom, Yahoo became one of the central companies of the era. The company attracted huge investments, and Filo became a billionaire.

Filo worked at Yahoo as a technical architect for more than twenty years. When the main part of Yahoo was sold to Verizon in 2017, he left the company.

Today, David Filo focuses on managing his personal investments and on philanthropy.