Jerry Yang and David Filo (among the Top 25 Visionaries) started off as two graduate students at Stanford University. Today, they have a combined personal net worth of billions. That is all thanks to Jerry Yang’s and David Filo’s attempts to find anything they could do to avoid working on their doctoral theses.

Bored one day, the two decided to play around with the newly emerging Internet and create a list of their favorite sites. That list has since grown into Yahoo!, one of the world’s most popular online search portals, with hundreds of millions of visitors each month and billions of dollars in revenues.

With little more than their own creativity and hard work, the pair managed to secure funding, launch their business, and become the poster boys of a burgeoning industry.

How did they do it?

“For those of you who’ve done any kinds of thesis work, it’s pretty laborious and tedious, to say the least, so at the beginning of 1994, we started to procrastinate and spend a lot of time on the newly emerged ‘web.’

Really, we’d do anything to keep from working on our theses. And then, a funny thing happened. We called it ‘Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.’ Before we knew it, people from all over the world were using this database that we created. We settled on Yahoo! It is a pretty recognizable brand name.

It was a really gradual thing, but we’d find ourselves spending more and more time on it. It was getting to be a burden. Stanford told us we were crashing their system and that we’d have to move the thing off campus. You have to realize when David and I were doing this it was just for fun. We never thought it would even become a business.

I believe that Yahoo! is too often defined by the competitive landscape, rather than by what we can accomplish with our assets. I’m determined for us to define our own path. Our purpose/goal is the same, to keep the internet free to the users and make the business part work by finding sponsors and advertisers who want to reach our audience. I think it is one of the keys to keep improving the usefulness of the web and make sure that as many people as possible can use it and derive value from it.

The more I look back, the more I realize how fortunate we were to find the right partners, the right management. It seemed natural and intuitive then. Now I realize what key parts of our business they are.

Stanford had a huge part in shaping us. We saw Jim Clark (co-founder and chairman of Netscape) coming to school. Bill Gates came and built his building next to our trailer. The venture capital is there. If you are interested in starting a business, you’ll find other people talking about launching companies.

I think that it’s always possible to have a great company if you have great ideas. I will say that since the web has become more commercialized, it also takes some good financial resources to build a great business, but as I always say, you have to have the idea first.“