In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company whose name once embodied the go-go spirit of the internet but had, over the years, become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO post from the new private-equity owner Apollo Global Management, which had bought the property from Verizon, the most recent and possibly most clueless caretaker (high bar alert) in a long series of management shifts. Visiting him at the company’s offices in New York City, I ask him why he took the job. “I love turnarounds,” he says.
Lanzone’s résumé confirms that. In 2001 he took over a sagging search property called AskJeeves—its share price was less than a dollar, down from a high 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 CBS’s chief digital office during the 2010s, he yanked the stuffy Tiffany network into the streaming age. Yahoo, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, might be his biggest challenge yet. Its history is pocked with missed opportunities, which explains in part why a public company once worth well over $100 billion was sold to a private equity firm for $5 billion in 2021. Yahoo famously passed on buying Google, and actually got Mark Zuckerberg to tentatively agree to sell Facebook for $1 billion before then CEO Terry Semel asked to renegotiate, which squelched the deal. Talent that walked out Yahoo’s door included the founders of WhatsApp. Promising acquisitions like Flickr, Tumblr and Huffington Post were ditched at fire-sale prices. In recent years Yahoo was a low-priority property for its owner, Verizon. Instead of trying to revive its purple glory, it merged Yahoo’s assets with those of another failed icon, AOL, and dubbed the new brand Oath.
Some pegged Lanzone’s chances at zero. “It’s hard to believe anyone else on the planet wants any part of his role, “ wrote George Bradt, one of those MBA types who churn out content for Forbes. Lanzone saw something different. In his view, Yahoo was an unacknowledged gem. “If you were able to take the name Yahoo off of it and look at the business in 2021, you saw billions in revenue,” he says.
Lanzone has little patience for exhuming past blunders. “I think the story of Yahoo’s missed opportunities is tired,” he says. “It’s boring.” Instead of crying over lost search glory, Lanzone concentrated on improving what Yahoo did. “We didn’t have to worry about what we weren’t,” he says. He got rid of money-losing units, like some nonperforming ad tech divisions, and quietly made some acquisitions to bolster the best properties, like Wagr, a sports betting app, to bring Yahoo Sports into the gambling age. He also brought in capable executives like former ESPN digital head Ryan Spoon, who now heads Yahoo Sports. He’s boosted profits and grown the company’s audience to the point where he says that Yahoo has performed the quickest return of any Apollo acquisition. Since Yahoo is private, the actual financials aren’t available. But Yahoo’s comms team provided me with a lengthy document packed with data to bolster Lanzone’s claim that Yahoo still has something to yodel about. Comscore, a marketing company that measures traffic, ranks Yahoo No. 1 in news, No. 1 in finance, and No. 3 in sports. It’s second only to Gmail in mail. He tells me that in the US alone, “hundreds of millions” of people use Yahoo every month.
A year after Lanzone took the job, the entire tech world was turned around by the appearance of ChatGPT. In previous transformations like search, social, and mobile, Yahoo has a near-perfect record of botching these moments. Lanzone says Yahoo won’t be creating its own language models or dropping $100 billion on data centers, but he believes the company will seize the moment nonetheless. “I’d like to automate the word ‘AI’ so I don’t have to say it so much,” he says. Yahoo has in-house machine-learning talent and draws on outside companies for AI technology. For instance, it partners with the startup Sierra for robot customer service agents.
One of Lanzone’s canniest AI moves was acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator created by Instagram cofounders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the pair decided it would not become a viable business, they announced its closure and Lanzone was among multiple suitors vying for the underlying technology. It became the centerpiece of the homepage that Yahoo relaunched earlier this year. “Instead of incorporating their technology into our product, we did it the other way,” Lanzone says. “Essentially Yahoo News is now Artifact.” Systrom approves. “We partnered with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned on deploying our hard work to many millions of people,” he says.