Last Friday, Wall Street screamed "Yahoo!"
The Yahoo! Internet directory went public, offering their company stock to be traded on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time. And yes, the exclamation point is part of their name
The success of the offering justifies the exclamation point. The price of Yahoo! stock increased 150 percent last Friday, bettering even Netscape's record-breaking offering last summer. They earned about $200 million for the company in that one day and put the company worth at about $1 billion.
The twenty-something founders, Jerry Filo and David Yang, are worth a cool $230 million each. It's good to be, as they call themselves, Chief Yahoos. But the drop-out Stanford graduate students will be eating macaroni and cheese and living in converted garages for maybe a little longer; by law, they can't sell their stock for a couple of years.
Yahoo!'s public offering was a crucial test for Internet stock. Last summer, Netscape's stock went crazy as the first Internet stock offering. People who didn't even know then what the Internet was demanded the stock and drove the price up. Now, weariness of technology stocks and the volility of the stock market made people watch Yahoo! very carefully.
Still, it's doubtful that Yahoo! is worth the $1 billion Wall Street evaluates it at or that Netscape is worth its $2 billion. Just like the United States' dollar bill's worth is based on faith that people will continue to accept it around the world, companies like Yahoo!'s worth is based upon fear. People fear that if they don't get on board with the future, that a bunch of Yahoos might leave them in the dust.
That's what counts on the Internet-doing it first and then, if you have enough time, doing it right. Yahoo's origins as a pet project two years ago made it the first, but two more years from now, we will look back it and laugh about how bad it is. I'm not saying I don't like Yahoo!; I use it almost everyday. It's just that in two years, Yahoo! will be twice as old as it is today and I'm sure it will look very different.
One thing is certain about these Yahoos: they're making a lot of money. It reminds me of that other guy, you know the rich one, what's-his-name_ah, yes_Bill Gates. He dropped out of Harvard. Come to think of it, when Netscape was molded together in the Silicon Valley, they grabbed a bunch of kids prematurely out of The University of Illinois and they're all millionaires now.
There seems to be a common thread here; let me see if I can piece it together: Wirehead drops out of college. Wirehead has a lot of fun. Wirehead gets super-rich.
I've only got a month to go before graduation and that leaves only one more month to sit by the phone and wait for The Call. "Hi, there Jeff? I'm in California and I'm starting this Internet company and we're having a lot of fun. I know you're still in school, but would you like to come join us tomorrow? By the way, how would you like to be rich?"