The Signal Interview
Yahoo was in retro mode as it celebrated its 30th anniversary this spring, with a kitsch “back to the ’90s” banner draped over the front desk of its New York office and images of CDs, cassette tapes and Rubik’s cubes hanging from the ceiling. Jim Lanzone has only been Yahoo’s CEO since 2021, but he embraced the flashbacks to a moment when the company was the cutting edge of internet startups.
Since Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo created “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web” on Stanford University’s campus, the company’s history has been “marked by many ups and a few downs,” Lanzone wrote on LinkedIn. But “most companies don’t make it this far at all.”
Yahoo’s heritage is a double-edged sword for anyone running it in 2025. Generations of employees before Lanzone’s team talked about “bleeding purple”, in reference to its corporate colors. But “a lot of that was about circling the wagons” — a defensive response to the changes of ownership and strategy they’d been through, and the decline in Yahoo’s valuation since its $125 billion peak. In 2021, Apollo Global Management’s private equity team bought it from Verizon for less than $5 billion.
Yet, as Lanzone likes to remind people, the company is still one of the internet’s five busiest destinations, with 3 billion visits last month according to Similarweb — more than the traffic to Amazon. Nearly 90% of online Americans visit Yahoo each month, and almost half of them are Millennials or Gen Z, according to Comscore, which says Yahoo has America’s No. 1 finance site, the country’s second-biggest news and email offerings, and its third-busiest sports site. “We were able to pick up this incredible asset that, if you took the name Yahoo off of it, is one of a kind,” Lanzone says, adding that Apollo picked it up for a “one-time-only, incredible price.”
Inertia is a powerful force, and people rarely change their email or fantasy sports accounts. Earlier owners and executives have been tempted by the enduring size of its audience, yet have failed to extract more value from it. Lanzone’s challenge is to breathe new life into a 30-year-old brand by persuading advertisers and users to look at it afresh.
“We had to come in here and think about why Yahoo exists,” he says. That meant taking inspiration from the company’s original mission of being users’ trusted guide through “the Wild West of the internet,” but not being trapped by it. The meaning of such a mission has changed in the era of spam, misinformation, and deepfakes, Lanzone notes. What his team had to do was put “a modern lens on it” and move from relying on a legacy audience to accelerating innovation and growth. The second you stop improving internet properties, their audiences drift away, he says. “It’s like the quote from The Shawshank Redemption: Get busy living or get busy dying.”
Fix, rebuild and then innovate
Lanzone’s interpretation of that mandate has played out in stages. “Phase one of the turnaround is always [assembling] the team and the structure and fixing things,” he says: “Then you earn the right to start rebuilding things. The next phase on top of that is true innovation, unexpected things.”
The “fixing things” stage included cutting more than 1,600 employees from its ad-tech division in 2023, as it shut down an unprofitable “supply-side” automated advertising business to build an industry-leading “demand-side” platform and relaunch dedicated ad-sales teams for Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, and Yahoo Sports.
Since then, Yahoo has updated each of its main products, including “almost every single pixel” of its homepage. It has built up core properties through bolt-on acquisitions including social investment site Common Stock, sports betting app Wagr and news rating company The Factual. At the same time, it has also sharpened its focus on that core by pulling out of some markets and selling brands that did not fit, like tech news site TechCrunch and student sports platform Rivals.
“It’s just a very different company than it was in 2021,” Lanzone says. But he’s still facing the challenge of convincing its users and, critically, advertisers of that fact — which helps explain his decision this year to run Yahoo’s first Super Bowl ad since 2002. Its pitchman this time was the rumpled actor Bill Murray, responding in real time to messages fans sent to his Yahoo Mail address. Buying local ad slots in key markets, at a fraction of the price of national airtime, meant “we did it very cost-effectively,” Lanzone notes.
“A players” with a love of the game
“The hardest thing to do is to build a brand,” Lanzone says, but he is betting that by bringing in “great product people” and entrepreneurial leaders to one that has already established such a large following, he can find growth.
Before Yahoo, Lanzone ran the dating app Tinder, the digital media brands of CBS Interactive, the search engine Ask.com, and his own startup, an online media guide called Clicker.
What those experiences taught him was that, on arriving at a new company, you should start by identifying and elevating “the underappreciated superstars with high potential.” Then you need to bring in transformative talent from outside, a task for which Lanzone tapped his own networks, emphasizing the chance Yahoo offered them to apply their skills to a vast online audience. Chief Marketing Officer Josh Line came from Paramount Global, the former ViacomCBS, while Rob Wilk, Yahoo’s global head of consumer sales, worked at Snap, on whose board Lanzone sits.
Each member of his senior team has been a founder or part of a startup before joining Yahoo, and came with networks of their own, he says. “A players don’t just weed out B players; they also attract other A players,” he says.
He looks for four things in those key hires: domain expertise; emotional intelligence (people with high EQ are “high on productivity [and] low on politics,” he observes); natural ambition; and what he calls “love of the game.” Your people are your values, Lanzone says, and they have to believe in what they’re doing: “Our culture is people who love the mission, [and] love the idea of putting Yahoo back on the map.”
A nice place to stay in the internet’s AI era
Private ownership means that it remains hard for outsiders to gauge the impact Lanzone’s team has had. Yahoo publishes no details of its finances, though Lanzone has said it is “very profitable” and Apollo has described the Yahoo deal as delivering one of its fastest-ever returns on investment.
Apollo didn’t buy Yahoo “to tear costs out of it,” Lanzone says. Instead, “the pressure on me and my team is growth.” And that may mean more acquisitions. Asked whether Yahoo might add another leg to a stool held up by news, finance, and sports, he replies enthusiastically: “One hundred percent. More than one. We’ve looked; we’ve been a part of discussions on that.”
“We haven’t found the right deal yet,” he says, citing a reluctance to pay “frothy” prices, but adding that Yahoo remains “ambitious” about M&A. Lanzone’s most prominent purchase so far has been Artifact, an AI-driven news aggregator created by Instagram’s co-founders, which he says more than doubled the usage of Yahoo’s news app. It is part of Lanzone’s strategy to embed AI features into core products, from mail and search to fantasy sports. But the speed at which AI is changing consumers’ behavior online points to the potential threats the technology poses to a company dependent on selling advertising to vast online audiences.
“If we put our heads in the sand, we’re just going to get trampled on,” Lanzone says. “If we don’t innovate and get out ahead of it, we die.” That’s true of any company, he says, likening those who ignore the disruptions AI heralds to characters in the movie Don’t Look Up who tune out warnings of a humanity-threatening comet.
Online searches may soon look totally different because of AI, he says, but “I would love to be able to start competing in that space with a search audience as big as mine, with a user base as large as mine, with the personal relationship that we have with all of our users.” That relationship began with Yahoo putting up old-school billboards advertising itself as “a nice place to stay on the internet.” The opportunity Lanzone sees now is to play a similarly hospitable role for a broad set of users who are just exploring the new terrain this generation’s technology opens up for them.
It will be pursuing that goal under Apollo’s ownership for some time, he suggests, saying it’s too soon to talk about returning to the public markets. “We’ve got the revenue model ripping, but that it’s just the start of it,” he says. “We’re still early in what we think we can do here… But do I think we have a tiger by the tail? Yes.”