Lanzone’s CV confirms this. In 2001, he took over the falling search property called Askjeeves – the price of the shares was smaller than the dollar, compared to the highest USD 196 – and built it to the point where Iac Corp Barry Diller bought it for $ 1.85 billion. In CBS Interactive, and then the main CBS digital office in 2010, he pulled the stuffy Tiffany network into the streaming era. Yahoo, celebrating its 30th anniversary this month, may be his biggest challenge so far. His history is flooded by omitted capabilities, which partly explains why a public company worth over $ 100 billion was sold to Private Equity for $ 5 billion in 2021. Yahoo famous After purchasing Google and in fact Marek Zuckerberg, you would initially agree to sell Facebook for $ 1 billion, and then the General Director of Terry Semel asked for renegotia, which brought the contract. The talent that came out Yahoo’s door is the founders of WhatsApp. Promising acquisitions such as FlickrTumblr and Huffington Post They were abandoned at fire sales prices. In recent years, Yahoo has been a low priority, Verizon. Instead of trying to revive his purple glory, he combined Yahoo assets with the assets of another unsuccessful icon, AOL I The brand’s new oath was called.
Some set Lanzone chances to zero. “It’s hard to believe that anyone else on the planet wants any part of his role,” he wrote George Bradt, One of those types of MBA that pretends to be forbes. Lanzone saw something else. In his opinion, Yahoo was an unrecognized gem. “If you were able to remove the name Yahoo and look at the company in 2021, you saw billions of revenues,” he says.
Lanzone has little patience to exhuts past mistakes. “I think the story of Yahoo missing capabilities is tired,” he says. “It’s boring.” Instead of crying over the lost glory of the search, Lanzone focused on improving what Yahoo did. “We didn’t have to worry about what we weren’t,” he says. He got rid of equipped money, such as some non -forming advertising divisions, and quietly took over to strengthen the best real estate, such as Wagr, bookmaking application to introduce Yahoo Sports into the age of gambling. He also brought talented management, such as the former director of ESPN Ryan Spoon, who now manages Yahoo Sports. He increased the profits and enlarged the company’s audience to such an extent that he says that Yahoo reached the fastest return of every Apollo acquisition. Because Yahoo is private, real finances are not available. But the Comms Yahoo team provided me with a long document filled with data to strengthen Lanzone’s theorem that Yahoo still has something to Yodel. Comscore, a marketing company that measures movement, places Yahoo No. 1 in News, No. 1 in finance and 3 in sport. Second to Gmail in the post office. He tells me that in the US themselves “hundreds of millions” employ Yahoo every month.
A year after Lanzone took up a job, the whole world of technology was reversed through the appearance of chatgpt. In previous transformations, such as searching, social and mobile, Yahoo has an almost perfect record of these moments. Lanzone claims that Yahoo will not create its own language models or drop $ 100 billion on data centers, but believes that the company will take over the moment. “I would like to automate the word” AI “, so I don’t have to say that much,” he says. Yahoo has internal talent for machine learning and is based on external companies for AI technology. For example, he works with the Sierra startup for robot customer service agents.
One of the most essential movements of AI Lanzone was the acquisition of an artifact, an information aggregator with AI drive created by the co -founders of Instagram Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. When the couple decided that they would not become a profitable business, they announced that its closing, and Lanzone belonged to many suitors fighting for base technology. It became the focal point of the main page, which Yahoo launched again at the beginning of this year. “Instead of including your technology in our product, we did it in a different way,” says Lanzone. “Basically, Yahoo News is now an artifact.” Systrom approves. “We worked with Yahoo because they made a strong offer, but also because they planned to implement our hard work for many millions of people,” he says.