The Accident-Yahoo
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Sunny and Halle spent a passionate night together, but the morning sunshine came with its own worries. Halle was called for dubbing her scenes while Sunny had a meeting at Stanford.

"You will call me, right?" Halle asked while giving a light kiss to Sunny.

"You don't need to worry about that. Since you are free, you can stay with me. See you tonight."  Sunny kissed her back and his words made Halle feel all her efforts were truly worth it.

Halle drove away with a large grin and Sunny drove directly to Stanford for his meeting.

"Sir, we have meetings with the computer department team after the meeting with Placement Coordination Head. I have enquired and there have been some new hirings at Stanford.

This makes it difficult for us to judge the meeting agenda but overall, it should not be a negative thing for us." Harris handing out a thin file to Sunny spoke.

The file had the profiles of the Professors and a brief description of their research work.  Sunny took the file and started reading it carefully. Trying to remember the names and matching them with their pictures.

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(Stanford University)

After an hour-long flight, Sunny and his team finally reached Stanford university. It's a huge university on more than 8,000 miles (30+ km) and its alumni are previous senators, scientists and even Nobel laureates.

Sunny had a hard time focusing after he reached here. In this life, Sunny barely passed high school and had never been to any college or in university. For him, to come here to meet the professors and think about hiring students from here was as like a big ironic joke.

"Sir, this way," Harris suddenly broke his train of thoughts.

"Sure," Sunny replied and followed Harris.

Together they arrived at the central building where they met the head of the Placement Coordination team. After meeting the not-so-impressive faculty and students, Sunny went directly to meet the Professors in the Computer Systems Laboratory

Sunny felt like he was being interviewed by the professors and his ideas related to the internet and its application were briefly discussed. It was all very boring, and Sunny felt like he was wasting his time until he was invited to check the current work being done by students and Professors.

The first project was shocking enough to silence Sunny and prove the legacy of Stanford. Professor Marc Levoy was building a 3D Fax machine. A 3D Fax machine or more simply a machine that is capable of 3D printing and this is being done in 1993.

Sunny had no choice but to put down his arrogance and become more friendly and humble in front of this kind of geniuses. Finally, the tour ended with Sunny giving a very brief lecture in the CSL department.

"Internet is not a tool for scientists or researchers but it is a vast open free space where people from all walks of life, all corners of the planet will meet and interact with each other.

Internet is true freedom because you can share your thoughts and your story. It will be a place where one day you will be able to find all the course books and notes of all the lectures at Stanford. 

Trust me, the day will come when there will be pocket-sized devices that enable you to use the internet from anywhere and you will be playing a movie or listening to a song or simply checking your thesis information."

Sunny's brief description about the internet and its application did stir a lot of hearts in the CSL team and while Sunny left the university after getting the invitation for campus hiring, two students that night started discussing how to rectify their present website.

These two students - David Filo and Jerry Yang are close friends and both are doing their PhD in EE/CSL, and they have been working on a personal project. This project codenamed - Yahoo, is in its infancy and its main purpose is it build a human-edited web directory, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages.

However, after the lecture of Sunny, they visited the website he developed with his team. The CODEX (codex.com), seems much better than their web directory, has more information in terms of news articles and its interface is quite different and easy.

Adding to the fact that it is launched directly after clicking the now famous browser - Rocket, the growth and popularity of this CODEX seemed inevitable.

"Jerry, I think we should simply drop this idea. They are already doing it and they are doing it on a bigger scale. Look, if we launch our website like this, it won't make any sense." David Filo argued.

"I know. I know ... Okay .... Damn. I just need six months or maybe less to launch our website. But those guys are already ahead of us. Shit! What do you think we need to modify to make sure we can fight with them?" Jerry asked.

"We need to provide different services. I think we should also think about providing news articles, especially financial news and get some students on board to help us write articles and blogs. We can create a viewpoint where Stanford students, from finance to medical to our computer science, all can share their viewpoints on current news." David replied after crossing a few ideas he had in his diary.

"Great! I was thinking the same. We can't buy news, but we can write our own editorial about the news articles. It will be like an online magazine with our directory being a part of it. We can try to copy magazines like Time or Forbes." Jerry spoke his own thoughts.

"Cool. Cool....this is great. Our directory will be like one part. News and articles are another part and then the most attractive part will be the editorial and student journals." David also agreed after thinking about Jerry's idea.

Both of the friends decided to launch their website - Yahoo after modifying it and adding similar functions like CODEX but also using Stanford students as free writers for their own website.

In 1993, Sunny himself created his biggest rival Yahoo and pushed its founders ahead of time to expand their possible website. Sunny had no idea how big of a monster his small speech created.

After all, every student and Professor at Stanford is a more or less free thinker and independent thinker at its core and now these two boys were ready to exploit this group and turn them into free workers.

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