itstargetnews
Listen and subscribe to Opening Bid a Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.
Given the exponential rise of the market in artificial intelligence stocks like Nvidia (NVDA), the space is sure to be on the minds of many investors right now, but seasoned tech players know that too much hype can sometimes spell disaster.
“I think the wave of AI is coming,” Yahoo co-founder i AME Cloud Ventures founding partner Jerry Yang told the executive editor of Yahoo Finance Brian Sozzi in the 100th episode of the Opening offer podcast (see video above; listen below). “Maybe it’s our turn, 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 then you get to the other side.”
Yang, 56, has spent his entire career betting on (and mostly winning) technology.
He was a PhD student at Stanford when he co-founded “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” with his friend and classmate David Filo in 1994.
His pet project served as a website directory that gained traction and attention immediately. The name was initially changed to “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”.
After receiving one million hits in late 1994, the duo made another name change. Yahoo (an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officer Oracle) was incorporated and launched in 1995.
Explosive growth fueled by rocket-like Internet adoption led them to take the company public in 1996.
A meeting with Alibaba (baby), founder Jack Ma in 1997, would ultimately benefit Yang and the company when Yahoo bought a 40% stake in Alibaba for $1 billion in 2005, an investment it would later sell for $7.6 billion in 2012.
Yang was CEO of Yahoo from 2007 to 2009 and left the company in 2012. Yahoo has been owned by private capital company Apollo Global Management (APO) from September 2021.
Today, Yang is an early-stage investor at AME Cloud Ventures, making bold bets in technology like quantum computing with Rigetti Computing (RGTI) – and spends the rest of his time as a Silicon Valley statesman doling out guidance to would-be visionaries.
One of the advantages companies newer to the AI domain have over their higher-tech predecessors is the benefit of hindsight.
“When we were building the company and the Internet was being built, there was no playbook,” Yang said. “It was literally the Wild West and you were trying to figure out what (everything) was like.”
Read more: Why Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is so bullish on AI agents
