Inside look at Yahoo’s rise and fall

Jeremy Ring is telling the inside story of the rapid rise and collapse of the pioneering search engine Yahoo and how the company’s missteps contributed to today’s domination of the internet by Google and Facebook.

Ring knows the inside story. He was one of the earliest employees at Yahoo when it was the ascendant force online. He became its director of sales in early 1996 and stayed until the middle of 2001, becoming wealthy along the way.

But the company, riding high during the 1990s tech boom and falling during the dot-com bust in 2000, made a series of well-publicized missteps over the years, and was sold to Verizon in 2016, tarnished by the news that all three billion of its user accounts had been hacked in 2013.

“It’s a story of incredible missteps, probably some ego involved,” Ring said. “The decisions that Yahoo made shaped the world that we live in today. We pioneered the digital information age; I think everyone agreed with that. Those decisions allowed Facebook and Google to grow and become the behemoths that they are . . . Those two organizations control our lives.”

Ring started with Yahoo by opening its East Coast office in his apartment and ended in California. A Florida financial disclosure form from 2016 said his net worth was $12.6 million (U.S.). Among the blunders: Turning down the chance to buy Google for $1 million.; a deal to buy eBay that fell apart; negotiations to buy Facebook for $1.1 billion that fell apart when Yahoo tried to get a lower price. We Were Yahoo: From Internet Pioneer to the Trillion Dollar Loss of Google and Facebook — published by Post Hill Press, distributed by Simon & Schuster.