Leading creator and host of The Comment Section podcast Drew Afualo made this year’s #BBWomenInMusic# extra special. 🫶 #YahooPartner# From getting ready with @Yahoo Mail with Planner through sharing her highlights, see what Drew had to say about the star-studded experience.

As a kid, Mark Cuban sold stamps door-to-door and then gave disco lessons to help pay his way through Indiana University. Cuban first built streaming pioneer Broadcast. com with Todd Wagner in 1995 and sold it to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. Today, he owns a minority stake in the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and is cofounder of Cost Plus Drugs, which he launched in January 2022 with the aim of lowering prescription drug prices. See where the shark ranks among the top innovators on the #Forbes250# list. (Photo: Guerin Blask for Forbes)

Mike Santullo and Larry Drebes are two of my favorite entrepreneurs ever. Every time I came to a board meeting, Mike and Larry would have a new software product or feature to demo. The energy in their company was palpable. They cold-called me on a Monday, we met that week, and had a term sheet the following Thursday. I felt like I needed to move as fast as they did. Four11 started as a lookup service for business websites. Then they met the Hotmail founders at a DFJ Schmoozefest and learned about web-based email and viral marketing. So they decided to do it themselves. They launched RocketMail. Sold it to Yahoo. The product is now called Yahoo Mail. It has 200+ million users today. The lesson is obvious. Speed matters. Energy matters.

Bill Gross was a genius out of Caltech. When we met Bill, he explained how he was going to create the search tool for commerce. We were so impressed with his idea that we agreed to fund him. The idea was a search engine called GoTo with bidded listings. Bill changed the face of internet advertising forever. The genius was that advertisers would pay for search terms. GoTo would charge different prices for different terms based on demand. This was the beginning of paid search. Before Bill, no search engine had any profitable business model. This innovation became instrumental to the success of Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and all the other paid search engines. GoTo later rebranded as Overture and acquired other search engines. In 2003, Yahoo bought Overture for $1.6 billion. The worldwide paid search industry is now estimated to be over $300 billion. Paid search is common sense now. Back then, it was a stroke of genius from Bill.

Creator and “Crusader for Women” Drew Afualo is co-hosting the red carpet. 🤩 #YahooPartner# Tune in to watch her go LIVE at #BBWomenInMusic# with Billboard’s Lyndsey Havens on April 29 via Billboard’s YouTube and Plus, you can submit a @Yahoo fan mail question that you want her to ask the stars she meets — submit now on our Stories.