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Given the exponential market run-ups in AI stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA), the space is sure to be on many investors’ minds right now — but the seasoned tech players know that too much hype can sometimes spell disaster.
“I think the AI wave is coming,” said Yahoo co-founder and AME Cloud Ventures founding partner Jerry Yang to Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sozzi on the 100th episode of his Opening Bid podcast (see video above; listen below). “Maybe it’s upon us, depending on who you talk to.”
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“We’ve seen a few waves of technology, and with each one of these waves, [we] go through this hype cycle,” said Yang. “And then you cross the chasm and then you come to the other side.”
Yang, 56, has spent his entire career betting on (and mostly winning at) 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 gathered steam and attention immediately. 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 did another name switch. Yahoo (an acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) was incorporated and launched in 1995.
Explosive growth fueled by the rocket-ship like adoption of the internet 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 sell for $7.6 billion in 2012.
Yang served as CEO of Yahoo from 2007 to 2009 and left the company in 2012. Yahoo has been owned by private equity firm Apollo Global Management (APO) since Sept. 2021.
Today, Yang is an early stage investor at AME Cloud Ventures — making bold bets like quantum computing with Rigetti Computing (RGTI) — and spends the other part of his time as a Silicon Valley statesman handing out guidance to aspiring visionaries.
One advantage newer companies in the AI domain have over their more senior tech predecessors is the benefit of hindsight.
“When we were building the company and the internet was being built, there was no playbook,” said Yang. “It was literally the Wild West and you were trying to figure out what [everything] looked like.”
Read more: why Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is so bullish on AI agents
