Jerry Yang co-founded Yahoo! in 1995 with fellow Stanford graduate student David Filo and served on its board and as a member of its executive team until 2012, including as CEO from 2007 to 2009. In 2012, he founded AME Cloud Ventures, a venture fund that invests in seed-stage to later-stage tech companies that build infrastructure and value chains around data.

Yang is set to become the first Asian American to serve as the Chair of Stanford University’s Board of Trustees in July, 2021. At Stanford, he has served twice on the board of trustees, the first time from 2005 to 2015. He joined the board again in October 2017 and has served as its vice chair. Yang and Filo were recognized as Engineering Heroes by the Stanford School of Engineering in 2013. The program recognizes the achievements of Stanford engineers who have advanced the course of human, social and economic progress through engineering.

Yang currently sits on the boards of Alibaba, Workday and Lenovo. He also serves as director of the Monterey Peninsula Foundation and a trustee of Dunhuang Foundation (USA). He is a member of the Committee of 100 and the Council on Foreign Relations. He previously served on the boards of Cisco Systems and Asian Pacific Fund of San Francisco.

Jerry Yang was born in Taipei and immigrated to the United States in 1978, growing up in San Jose, California. Yang and his wife, Akiko Yamazaki (also a Stanford graduate), have been active philanthropists At Stanford, Yang and Yamazaki have supported a wide range of programs, including initiatives around artificial intelligence, environment and sustainability, the arts, COVID-19 research, and various scholarships and fellowships. Yang and Akiko were early supporters of UCSF’s Covid-19 Response Fund. Yang and Yamazaki are the lead donors to the San Francisco Asian Art Museum expansion.