It's Complicated | Interview with Jerry Yang | Founder Story | Startups.com

One of our favorite interviews we’ve done was with Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang. Not just because of what he’s done, but because of the time we did it. There are a lot of interesting moments in history to interview Yang — ours was just after Alibaba went public in the largest global IPO in tech history. This was a massive vindication for Yang, who originally brought the deal to Yahoo!, and argued against Yahoo! selling half of its stake off years later. He needed the vindication: Yang was supposed to be the Steve Jobs founder hero coming in to save Yahoo! back in 2008. He initially turned down a $40 billion acquisition by Microsoft, was eventually ousted as CEO, and Yahoo!’s long slide continued. It’s hard to assess his legacy: On the one hand, that Microsoft deal would have been far larger than Yahoo!’s eventual sale to Verizon. On the other, the greatest value of Yahoo! in its later years were those Asian assets that it wouldn’t have had without Yang. In this interview, we talk to Y

One of our favorite interviews we’ve done was with Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang. Not just because of what he’s done, but because of the time we did it. There are a lot of interesting moments in history to interview Yang — ours was just after Alibaba went public in the largest global IPO in tech history. This was a massive vindication for Yang, who originally brought the deal to Yahoo!, and argued against Yahoo! selling half of its stake off years later. He needed the vindication: Yang was supposed to be the Steve Jobs founder hero coming in to save Yahoo! back in 2008. He initially turned down