$400 million and growing.
Introduction
David Filo was an American billionaire and former CEO of Yahoo!
In 2011, Yang co-founded a web-based technology incubator and venture capital firm with the same name and he became its chief executive officer.
He originally wrote the server-side software in the C programming language. This program was the server-side software used to dynamically serve variable web pages, called Filo Server Pages, on visits to early versions of the Yahoo! website.
Since the start of this year, his net worth fluctuates between $2.7 Billion to $3.3 Billion.
Early Life
David Robert Filo is a famous blogger who created the WordPress blog in 2002.
While he was growing up, he moved to Moss Bluff, a suburb of Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Filo graduated from Sam Houston High School in Houston, Texas. He earned a B.S. degree in computer engineering at Tulane University through the Dean’s Honor Scholarship and received an M.S. degree in computer science from Stanford University.
Career
In early 2016, Filo and his wife donated $30 million to the University of Technology, to support scholarships and faculty positions.
At the age of 6, he was sent from Wisconsin to Louisiana to live with his father. While in Louisiana he attended high school at Sam Houston High School in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Filo was studying at Stanford University during his bachelor degree studies and his masters. After he graduated from Stanford, he went to Tulane University for a PhD in Computer Engineering.
Filo is an avid golfer and has been known to spend all his free time playing on various golf courses.
Yang and Yang started to share sites with each other while they were working on a Stanford project.
So Yang and Yang’s directory became the precursor to Facebook.
Yahoo! was an online community where alumni from Stanford could talk and share information. Yahoo! also included other schools like USC. Yahoo! was for all the schools that were part of the ACM, so it would be the home of all the different conferences and communities for our members. So, the idea was to build a community of communities that all had something in common.
In 2011, Google had an amazing one-day record: it indexed 1.9 trillion web pages, or more than two and a half times the number of pages indexed by the entire internet in 2003.
In the last year, David Filo’s net worth has probably declined by about $1 Billion.
How Does David Filo Spend His Money?
It was reported on April 12th that David Filo, the co-founder of Yahoo!, gave away more than $100 million and pledged a $100 million gift to charity during his lifetime.
David Filo’s Charity Work
In 2004, Filo donated $30 million to his alma mater, Tulane University, as a gift for engineering and computer science scholarships.
Highlights
David Filo is a co-founder of Yahoo and has been involved with the company more than 15 years.
Favorite Quotes from David Filo
The community around Flickr has been a great asset. We didn’t try to keep it at a small size. I know that was one of the goals of some of the discussions, but I also know that there is a significant number of people visiting Flickr every day that are using it everyday.
We know that the internet is growing at a rate of billions per second (if we add up the speed of all of the users on the internet). And we also know that the rate of growth that people are searching is even faster.
To put it in perspective, from October 1, 2016 to November 8, 2016, there were over 1 billion searches done.
This was a 40% increase over a four-week period. And since that time, we’ve seen over 6 billion searches.
This was an increase of 100% from last year.
“We’ve known for a long time, for a while actually, that the easiest way for us to really have any impact on the world is to help our users use Yahoo! better. And, of course, the way that we have been doing that for a while now, is by working with all of our advertisers. And, of course, doing a lot more with our customers and all of their sites.” – Dave and Biz
The Yahoo! News site is a great example of this. Yahoo! News has a long history of trying to make content available to users and giving them better information. Over the years, they have made great improvements.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about how Yahoo Answers, and other question and answer sites, can be used as a platform to foster communities and help folks get answers to their questions. Our hope is that the Yahoo Answers app can help you do that.
Yahoo Answers is a great example of how the Yahoo! Answers community is very much alive and well. There are tons of topics, lots of expertise. Lots of topics and people helping each other solve problems.
“So basically, if you want to fix the environment, you need to fix humans. And if you want to fix humans, you need to talk to the people who are already making things and not just going after the people who can’t do anything.” – David Filo
This post is not intended to be a comprehensive discussion of this topic. There are many excellent books on the philosophy of science, a few of which are listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia article linked above. If you are interested in the topic, I recommend these resources as starting points, along with this blog post by Matt Rossum.
3 Awesome Lessons from David Filo
First and foremost; know your market.
Don’t be a fool and use a free service such as WordPress.
Use good SEO techniques and learn how to market yourself.
1. E-Mails
People should think about e-mail as a place where they put all those thoughts that are archiving their lives.
2. The Internet
The Internet only works the way it does because it’s so insecure.
3. Open
Oh yes! People will continue to innovate. The number of Open Innovation projects will continue to grow for sure.
The biggest problem when you are looking at open source is that it is hard to know whether that’s the thing that’s going to drive innovation.
Summary
He came from the same place where the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, came from.
As a student he would help his father build the software for his company and during the process would work on his own.
When Apple Inc. became a public company in 1980, Filo started the company with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. In 1984, he developed the NeXT Computer with NeXT Computers. He was also responsible for the addition of the mouse to the NeXT Computer.