Number of words: 203

Yahoo began as a list of other sites that Jerry and David had bookmarked using Marc Andreessen’s recently launched Mosaic browser. Known initially as Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web, then Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, the list consisted at first of a hundred sites categorized manually into relevant headings. At first, traffic on the site was a thousand or so visitors each week. But by early 1995, traffic had grown to millions of hits a day. Stanford told them to move the site to their own servers. Jerry and David needed to raise funds to pay for them. Registered as Yahoo.com in January 1995, the company was incorporated in March 1995, and the following month, Sequoia invested $2 million, taking a 25 percent share of the company. The two engineers never finished their Ph.D.s. Jerry recalled, “When I first told my mom what we were doing, the best way I could talk about it was like a librarian. And she said you know you went through nine years of school to become a librarian. She was kind of shocked to say the least.”

Excerpted from page  of ‘Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma built’ by Duncan Clark