In 1994, “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” was little more than a digital storing house for sites Jerry Yang had discovered on the internet. But then it became Yahoo! and the whole world felt the effects of its brilliance.

David Shen was the fledgling company’s 17th employee, and its first designer, where he took on the overwhelming job of maintaining a good user experience while trying to figure out this new paradigm of online advertising for the company’s ever-growing mass of daily visitors, many of whom saw Yahoo! as the internet’s front page.

As the company grew, so did the stakes. As David’s responsibilities grew, so did the challenges. Yahoo! was raking in the dough, but a global financial crisis was looming, and the dot-boom years were about to go bust.

That’s when things got really interesting.

Faced with a crashing stock price and threats of a Microsoft buyout, Yahoo! had to change its ways, and fast.

In Takeover!, David Shen drives you through the nerdy, make-it-or-break-it inside story of the web’s first mega-company, where every day brought a new problem, every ad pushed the boundaries further, and every story added up to what became Yahoo!, the undisputed pioneer of the online advertising revolution.