Facebook and Yahoo: A Tale of Two Internet Pioneers

In the video promoting Facebook’s IPO, founder Mark Zuckerberg starts off by saying that in middle school he was a big fan of Yahoo, which along with Google, was his search engine of choice for scouring the web.

“It was this complete symbol of the age in which we live where now you have access to all of this information,” he said. How things have changed. Zuckerberg, who was 11 when Yahoo went public in 1996, is now preparing for his own initial public offering, one that will likely value his company at close to $100 billion. That’s about five times what Yahoo is worth. And in terms of sales, he’s almost caught up to the site he idolized. Facebook’s $4 billion in revenue over the past year trails Yahoo by just $1 billion. If the contrast between old and new wasn’t stark enough, now we get another development. While Zuckerberg, a celebrated 27-year-old college dropout, is on the road selling the world’s biggest investors on his company’s greatness, Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Scott Thompson is embroiled in a crisis surrounding his resume, which falsely stated that he graduated college with a degree in computer science.