Andrew Conru had several web businesses that were contemporaneous with the start of Yahoo. I worked with him for few months at W3.com (not current owner of site but a company that built websites for Egghead, New Media Magazine and others) in 94/95. It was at the start of the first dotcom era in Palo Alto. I was not involved in AFF which he started later. Conru was in the Mechanical Engineering PhD program at Stanford and could well have known the Yahoo guys.

EDIT: here is a pointer to original W3.com products http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0EIN/is_/ai_17179339