When the official history of Silicon Valley is (re)written, it...

When the official history of Silicon Valley is (re)written, it will be hard to judge which of Jerry Yang’s achievements is bigger: starting Yahoo or betting early on Jack Ma, chairman and CEO of Alibaba. Nine years ago, before Yang was CEO of Yahoo, he spent $1 billion of Yahoo’s money for 30% of Ma’s company. He knew the asset would be hugely valuable someday and refused to sell Yahoo to Microsoft when Steve Ballmer came calling in 2008, a decision that cost him his CEO job. “It’s not like I did anything,” he says, shrugging and tossing all the credit to Ma and his deputy, Joe Tsai. “They built the company. I didn’t.” But guess who’s getting a seat on Alibaba’s board post-IPO: nobody affiliated with Yahoo except Yang. His clear-eyed and early confidence in Alibaba has brought a whole new appreciation to his role as Silicon Valley’s new East-West power broker. Since leaving Yahoo, Yang has bankrolled more than 50 startups, including Evernote, Wattpad and Tango, through his investing firm, AME Cloud Ventures. The only signs of his chapter with Yahoo today are a smattering of gray in his hair and the $2 billion in his bank account (he ranks 324th on The Forbes 400). “I wanted to get back to being close to entrepreneurs,” says Yang, “I wanted to be able to do things at my own pace, make mistakes and nobody would care. People who observe me say I’m so much happier.” In many ways he’s more powerful as well. Read the full story by Parmy Olson on Forbes.com by forbes http://ift.tt/1pFBlLw

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