In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took a company about whose name once embodied the Go-Go mind of the Internet, but had become a joke over the years: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post of the new owner of the private equity owner Apollo Global Management, who had bought the real estate from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless carer (High Bar Alert) in a long series of management shifts. I visit him at the offices of the company in New York City and ask him why he took the job. “I like turnarounds,” he says.
The CV of Lanzone confirms that. In 2001 he took a hanging search about the called Askjeeves – the stock price was less than a dollar, at a peak of $ 196 – and built it back to the point where Barry Diller's IAC Corp bought it for $ 1.85 billion. At CBS Interactive and then the most important digital office of CBS in the years 2010, he pulled the stuffy Tiffany network in the streaming age. Yahoo, who is celebrating his 30th birthday this month, is perhaps his biggest challenge so far. History is fixed with missed opportunities, which partially explains why a public company that was once worth more than $ 100 billion was sold to a private equity company for $ 5 billion in 2021. Yahoo has passed famous to buying Google, and actually wanted Mark Zuckerberg to sell for the time for $ 1 billion for $ 1 billion. Renegotiate, who asked the deal. The founders of WhatsApp included talent that was the door of Yahoo. Promising acquisitions such as Flickr, Tumblr and Huffington Post were dumped at fire prices. In recent years, Yahoo was a real estate with a low priority for the owner, Verizon. Instead of trying to breathe new life into his purple glory, the Yahoo's assets merged with that of another failed icon, AOL, and the new oath.
Some opportunities of Lanzone at zero. “It is hard to believe that someone else wants a part of his role on the planet,” wrote George Bradt, one of those MBA types that harden content for Forbes. Lanzone saw something else. According to him, Yahoo was a non -recognized gem. “If you could take the name Yahoo off and look at the company in 2021, you saw billions of income,” he says.
Lanzone has little patience for the excavation of past blunders. “I think the story of the missed opportunities of Yahoo is tired,” he says. “It's boring.” Instead of crying for lost glory, Lanzone concentrated on improving what Yahoo did. “We didn't have to worry about what we were not,” he says. He got rid of loss loss, such as some non-performing advertising technicians, and quietly made some acquisitions to strengthen the best property, such as WAGR, a sports gambling app, to bring Yahoo Sports into the gambling time. He also brought in capable managers such as former ESPN digital head Ryan Spoon, who is now head of Yahoo Sports. He has increased the profit and grew the audience of the company to the point that he says that Yahoo has performed the fastest return of every Apollo acquisition. Because Yahoo is private, the actual financial data is not available. But Yahoo's Comms team gave me a lengthy document full of data to strengthen the Lanzone statement that Yahoo still has something to do. Comscore, a marketing company that measures traffic, arranges Yahoo no. 1 in News, no. 1 in Finance and No. 3 in Sport. It is the second only for Gmail in Post. He tells me that in the US, “hundreds of millions of” people use Yahoo every month.
A year after Lanzone took the course, the entire technical world was turned around by the appearance of Chatgpt. In earlier transformations such as searches, social and mobile, Yahoo has an almost perfect record of the failure of these moments. Lanzone says that Yahoo will not create his own language models or drop $ 100 billion on data centers, but he believes that the company will grab the moment. “I want to automate the word 'ai', so I don't have to say that much,” he says. Yahoo has internal machine-learning talent and well from external companies for AI technology. For example, it works together with the startup Sierra for Robot Customer Service Agents.
One of the Canniest AI movements of Lanzone was the acquisition of Artefact, the AI-driven news aggregator made by Instagram-MEDE founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the couple decided that it would not be a viable business, they announced the closure and Lanzone was several voorags who compete for the underlying technology. It became the center of the homepage that Yahoo launched again earlier this year. “Instead of including their technology in our product, we did it differently,” says Lanzone. “In essence, Yahoo News is now Artefact.” Systrom approves. “We worked with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they were planning to use our hard work with many millions of people,” he says.
