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Given the exponential increases in the market in artificial intelligence stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA), space is certainly on many investors’ minds right now – but seasoned tech players know that too much hype can sometimes lead to disaster.
“I think the AI wave is coming,” co-founder of Yahoo and AME Cloud Ventures founding partner Jerry Yang told the editor-in-chief of Yahoo Finance Brian Sozzi on the 100th episode of Opening offer podcast (see video above; listen below). “Maybe it’s up to us, depending on who you talk to.”
“We’ve seen a few waves of technology, and with each of those waves, (we) go through this hype cycle,” Yang said. “And then you cross the chasm and you get to the other side.”
Yang, 56, has spent his entire career betting (and mostly winning) on technology.
He was a doctoral student at Stanford when he co-founded “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” with his friend and classmate David Filo in 1994.
Their pet project served as a website directory that immediately attracted attention and interest. The name was initially changed to “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.
After receiving a million hits by the end of 1994, the duo changed their name. Yahoo (an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Unofficial Oracle) was incorporated and launched in 1995.
Explosive growth fueled by meteoric Internet adoption led them to take the company public in 1996.
A meeting with Alibaba (BABA) founder Jack Ma in 1997 would ultimately benefit Yang and the company when Yahoo purchased a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion in 2005, an investment it would later resell for $7.6 billion in 2012.
Yang served as CEO of Yahoo from 2007 to 2009 and left the company in 2012. Yahoo is owned by private equity company Apollo Global Management (APO) since September 2021.
Today, Yang is an early-stage investor at AME Cloud Ventures, making bold bets on technologies such as quantum computing with Rigetti Computing (RGTI) – and spends the rest of his time as a Silicon Valley statesman dispensing advice to aspiring visionaries.
One of the advantages new AI companies have over their more experienced technology predecessors is the benefit of hindsight.
“When we were building the company and the Internet, there was no playbook,” Yang said. “It was literally the Wild West and you were trying to figure out what (everything) was like.”
Learn more: Why Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is so optimistic about AI agents
