Jerry Yang's Yahoo!

As a fan of Sumo, Jerry Yang knows the name of the game is to stay on your feet and inside the ring.

“He’s fundamentally a really nice guy, but he’s in a very tough spot and I’m not sure there’s a solution right now,” says a former Yahoo! senior executive.

Mr Yang, 39, came to the US from Taiwan at the age of 10 with his widowed mother. He is married with a daughter, and has shot a hole-in-one at nearby Pebble Beach in 2005, and supports the San Francisco Ballet.

Yahoo began as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” in a trailer on the campus of Stanford University. That was 14 years ago this month.

The first two computers they used for the service were named Akebono and Konishiki, after the famous Hawaiian Sumo wrestlers, and interviews with him at the time identified Yang as a sports-loving, taco-eating late-night student-type.

“He knows the company better than anyone but we thought he might be too close to Yahoo!,” says Scott Kessler, internet analyst at Standard & Poor’s.

Via FT