The Rescuer

Jerry Yang
yahoo.com

Yang founded Yahoo! (YHOO) in 1995 with pal David Filo while both were doctoral students in electrical engineering at Stanford. Since then, the site has grown from a simple page filled with categorized Web links to the Internet's busiest portal. But after holding the title "Chief Yahoo" all these years, Yang was tapped in June as CEO to help the struggling company better compete with Google and an onslaught of upstarts nipping away at Yahoo's traffic and ad revenues. Already, Yang's presence at the top has improved morale, but he'll need to show enough vision to assure Yahoo's continued prominence.