He describes the time, in the mid-nineties, when Jerry Yang and David Filo took him to visit their campus trailer, which was littered with pizza boxes and soda cans, to show off a directory of Web sites called Yahoo.

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We're only open Monday to Friday so a lot of our stuff comes in on a Monday - so all the drinks and cans came in and there were boxes and boxes of raw chicken breasts.

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Some people scoff that the boxes often contain items that can be found easily in the Philippines: bags of rice, sneakers, candy and cans of Spam a delicacy introduced to the islands by American soldiers stationed here for decades.

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