Before it reached a $125 billion valuation, before it grew to 345 million users, before its stock hit $500 per share, Yahoo Inc. was nothing more than a cramped, donated space strewn with empty pizza boxes and soda cans, occupied by students David Filo and Jerry Yang on the campus of Stanford University.

“It was a server under the desk,” recalled John Hennessy (pictured), computer science and electrical engineering professor at Stanford. “In fact, Dave and Jerry’s office was in a trailer.”

The year was 1994, and Yahoo (named for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”), was started by the two students as a way to list and share their favorite links on the World Wide Web. As the lists grew rapidly, they broke them into categories and then subcategories for easier reference.

“Yahoo’s use was exploding, and they were trying to build a portal out to serve this growing community of users,” Hennessy said. “Eventually, the university had to say, ‘You need to move this off-campus because it’s generating three-quarters of the internet traffic in the university, and we can’t afford it.’”

Hennessy spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, in Menlo Park, California, as part of the People First Network series. He was preceded by Navin Chaddha, partner at Mayfield Fund LLC. They discussed the paths taken by early internet search companies such as Yahoo and Google, Stanford’s role in fostering an innovative culture, Hennessy’s career in the development of processor technology, a recently formed endowment program for scholars and how the tech field has changed over several decades. (* Disclosure below.)

This week, theCUBE features John Hennessy as its Guest of the Week.

Front row of tech history

To say that Hennessy had a front row seat to Silicon Valley’s innovative history would be a gross understatement. After he joined the Stanford faculty in 1977, he went on to become chair of the university’s computer science department, dean of the School of Engineering, and ultimately the institution’s president, before stepping down from that post in 2016.

Throughout those decades, Hennessy witnessed the birth of numerous companies, incubated within the university’s signature sandstone walls, that would later become major forces not just in the technology industry, but in the entire corporate world. And in the beginning, there was Yahoo.

“They figured out how to use advertising as a monetization model, and that changed a lot of things on the internet,” Hennessy said. “That made it possible for Google to come along years later.”

Hennessy was dean of Stanford’s engineering school when two graduate students asked him to test a new search engine they had developed. The students were Sergey Brin and Larry Page, co-founders of Google Inc.

Ironically, the futures of both Google and Yahoo would intersect years later when Yahoo had a chance to license the new search technology developed by Brin and Page for the head-slapping amount of $1 million. Rather than take the deal in 1998, Filo urged the pair to build their own company. So they did.

Today, Google LLC is a global technology powerhouse with a market capitalization of more than $700 billion, and Hennessy rejoined his former student-founders when he became executive chairman of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, earlier this year. Yahoo was ultimately sold in 2016 to Verizon Communications Inc. for $5 billion.

The saga of the two historically significant companies that sprang from the Stanford ecosystem is also a tale of the innovative culture fostered during Hennessy’s tenure at the university.

“It was a notion of what really matters in the world, how to get impact, because in the end that’s what a university really wants to do,” Hennessy said. “That was something that was supported by the leadership of the university and that made it much easier for people to take their work out to the world.”

Co-founding MIPS

The Stanford professor has some familiarity with striking out on his own, because he took a leave from the university at one point in his career to do exactly that. During a sabbatical from the school in 1984-85, Hennessy applied his expertise in Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC, technology to co-found a new company called MIPS Computer Systems Inc.

RISC became an attractive technology because it allowed for easier pipelining and larger caches. MIPS’ RISC processors went on to play a key role in the rise of computer gaming and other entertainment systems, powering play systems from Sony Corp. and Nintendo Co. Ltd., and DVRs for providers such as Dish Network Corp. and TiVo Corp. MIPS was acquired this year by artificial intelligence startup Wave Computing Inc.

“We initially thought it would take over the general-purpose computing industry,” Hennessy said. “That 18 months was an intensive learning experience. I also became a much better teacher because I had actually built something in industry.”

Opportunity for scholars

From his perch in both the academic and corporate worlds, Hennessy has witnessed the evolution of technology and has focused his efforts over the past two years on the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program, billed as the largest fully endowed graduate-level scholarship offering in the world. It is funded through an endowment of $750 million, a major portion of which came through a grant provided by Phil Knight, co-founder and chairman emeritus of Nike Inc.

The focus for program participants is on both knowledge (scholars can pursue a graduate or professional degree in Stanford’s seven schools) and leadership. The former is especially important to Hennessy because he recognizes that the technology field has changed significantly since his earlier days in the engineering school.

“I could go to basically any Ph.D. defense and understand what was going on,” Hennessy explained. “No more; the field has just exploded. A young undergraduate, writing in Python and using all of these open libraries, could write more code in two weeks than I could have written in a year when I was a graduate student.”

Despite the powerful new tech development tools now available, young entrepreneurs still need mentoring. That’s a resource not often easy to find in the fast-paced world of Silicon Valley.

Hennessy appeared as part of the Mayfield People First Network, designed to give future Jerry Yangs and Sergey Brins the opportunity to hear from tech leaders who have spent plenty of time surrounded by empty pizza boxes in dusty trailers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event. (Disclosure: TheCUBE’s coverage of the Mayfield People First event is presented by Mayfield Fund LLC and SiliconANGLE Media Inc.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE