Timothy A. Koogle
School of Engineering and Applied Science '73
Yahoo! Inc.

Timothy Koogle, one of the Internet's most successful entrepreneurs, heads Yahoo!, which started in 1994 as a handmade directory of Web sites and now is visited by some 80 million people each month.

When he joined Yahoo! a year after it started, Koogle developed the model that every major search engine has followed: make the site free to users and support it with advertising. He was also the first to figure out how to use the search engine as the nucleus of a much broader, more inclusive service that has come to be known as a portal.

Koogle launched two earlier businesses, which he sold. He then spent three years as president of Intermec, a Seattle-based firm that invents bar code symbols.

In 1995 a headhunter called to tell him about a tiny company called Yahoo!, which had just four employees. He transformed it into one the Internet's best known names. Yahoo! will sell about $500 million in advertising this year.

Koogle graduated at the top of his engineering class at the University of Virginia in 1973.