Yahoo!

He came to US from Taiwan at the age of ten and hardly knew English. But, that didn't deter Jerry Yang at all, and he went out on to study at Stanford University for his Bachelor Degree, Master Degree and later a PhD in electrical engineering.

Right from his university days, Yang and another Graduate student, David Filo, started compiling a list of their favorite web sites. This list, known as the "Jerry's guide to the world wide web", had a huge fan following, and within a year, reach the one million hits mark. This was indeed big, and so Yang and Filo named their efforts Yahoo! (Coined after yahoos, the brutish creatures that find mention in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's travels.

Naturally, the authorities at Stanford found it quite distracting to their academic curriculum, and off went the duo to start their own company with a bare bone office space. Soon, yahoo! Got it first venture capital funding of $2 million form Sequoia capital, and its popularity grew by leaps and bounds

Creative ideas for enhancements to yahoo! Portal flowed, like e-mail, customization, and better search techniques. Today, yahoo! Accounts for 43.55 percent of all search an engine referrals and boasts of 149 million users.

And market capitalization…. $71.6 billion, of which Yang with approximately 8 percent ownership, has a share worth of over $5 billion.