In September 2021, Jim Lanzone took over a company with the name that had shown the spirit of the Internet but over the years, has become a joke: Yahoo. He accepted the CEO's post from the new private owner Apollo Global Management, who bought assets from Verizon, the most recent caregiver and possibly the most unknown person (Alert Bar Alert) in a series of long management cases. Visiting him at the company's offices in New York City, I asked him why he got the job. I love the rotation, he said.
Lanzone's Background confirms that. In 2001, he took over a sagged search property called Askjeeves, its stock price was less than a dollar, decreased from a high $ 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 digital office in 2010, he pulled the stuffy Tiffany network in the online era. Yahoo, the 30th anniversary of its founding, may be his biggest challenge. Its history is overlooked with missed opportunities, which explains partly why a public company used to be more than $ 100 billion was sold to a private joint stock company for $ 5 billion by 2021. Yahoo Yahoo. Famous has passed When buying Google and really led Mark Zuckerberg to sell Facebook for $ 1 billion before, CEO Terry Semel asked to negotiate, the company ignored the agreement. The talent stepped out of Yahoo door including the founders of WhatsApp. Church is promising like FlickrThen Tumblr And Huffington Post has been abandoned at the selling price. In recent years, Yahoo is a low priority asset for its owner, Verizon. Instead of trying to revive its purple glory, it merged Yahoo's property with other failed icons, AOL and Dubbed the new brand vow.
Some chances of Lanzone are closed at zero. It is hard to believe anyone else on the planet wants to have any part of his role, written George Bradt, One of the types of MBA has created content for Forbes. Lanzone saw something different. In my opinion, Yahoo is an unknown gem. If you can take the yahoo name out of it and look at the business by 2021, you have seen billions of revenue, he said.
Lanzone has little patience to excavate the past mistakes. I think the story of Yahoo's missed opportunities is tired, he said. “It is boring.” Instead of crying because the glory is lost, Lanzone focuses on improving what Yahoo has done. We don't have to worry about what we don't, he said. He escaped from units that lost money, such as some inappropriate advertising technology departments, and quietly performed some acquisitions to strengthen the best assets, such as WAGR, a sports betting app, to bring Yahoo sports in the gambling era. He also brought the capable executives as the former head of digital ESPN Ryan Spoon, who currently heads Yahoo Sports. He increased his profits and developed the audience of the company that he said that Yahoo had done the fastest return of any Apollo acquisition. Because Yahoo is private, the actual financial is not available. But Yahoo's Comms group provided me with a long document packed with data to strengthen Lanzone's statement that Yahoo still has something for Yodel to return. Comscore, a marketing company measuring traffic, ranked number 1 in news, No. 1 financial and number 3 in sports. It only ranks second after gmail in the letter. He told me that in the US alone, hundreds of millions of Yahoo users each month.
A year after Lanzone received the job, the entire technology world was revolved around the appearance of chatgpt. In previous changes such as searching, social and mobile, Yahoo has an almost perfect profile about damaging these moments. Lanzone said that Yahoo would not create its own language models or reduce $ 100 billion for data centers, but he believed the company would capture the moment. I want to automate the word 'Ai' so I don't need to say that much, he said. Yahoo has an indoor machine talent and attracts external companies for AI technology. For example, it cooperates with Sierra startup for robot customer service agents.
One of the most stylish AI moves of Lanzone is to acquire Artifact, the news that the news was provided by AI created by Instagram founder Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the couple decided not to become a feasible business, they announced the closing and Lanzone was among the many people who proposed to jealousy for basic technology. It became the center of the homepage that Yahoo launched earlier this year. Instead of combining their technology into our products, we did it in another way, Lan Lanzone said. Basically, yahoo news is currently an antiques. Systrom approved. We cooperated with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but because they planned to deploy our difficult work for millions of people, he said.