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On this episode of Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast, cohosts Diane Brady, executive editorial director of the Fortune CEO Initiative and Fortune Live Media, and editorial director Kristin Stoller talk to Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo. They talk about the company’s nostalgia aspect, where it fits in a new era of search and AI, and keeping Yahoo a “guide to the World Wide Web.”
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Jim Lanzone: But if you just stick to what users need, really need, not technology for technology’s sake. I saw this tweet, I can’t remember who did it, but she said, “I don’t want AI to create art so that I have time to do my laundry. I want AI to do my laundry so that I have time to make art.”
Diane Brady: Good luck with that.
Brady: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Leadership Next. The podcast about the people…
Kristin Stoller: …and trends…
Brady: …that are shaping the future of business. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: Yahoo, that’s what we’re talking about. I say “Ya-hoo” because I’m Canadian.
Stoller: It’s your accent, and I love how you say it. But I, as a ’90s kid, say Yahoo.
Brady: Yeah, and I say pasta. So it’s Yahoo and it’s Jim Lanzone, and he is the new CEO of a brand that is kind of hard to figure out. Tech, search, it’s media. It has been a cautionary tale. Is it a turnaround tale? What do you think?
Stoller: I just want to bring us back for a second, to the golden age of Yahoo. Founded in 1994, think back, Diane—what were you doing then? And did you have a Yahoo email address? Or what was your email provider?
Brady: I had just graduated. I was living in Asia. I remember my first email had many numbers in it, so I don’t think it was Yahoo. And look, I remember my first real encounter was when I came to the States, and I remember the arguments over whether we had to put the exclamation point, because they had an exclamation point in their name. And it used to honestly annoy me. It felt a bit sort of hubristic but yet it was the big beast in town.
Stoller: See for me, all the cool kids at school had Yahoo and AOL. I was stuck with CompuServe because I think my dad got it for free. Yeah, I hated it. But okay, so now we’ve moved past—and although I don’t want to say move past, because they still have people with Yahoo email addresses, it’s still the number-two email I would assume, after Google or Gmail.
Brady: A long number two. It has 3 billion hits a month, which makes you wonder about that intersection of influence—do eyeballs and influence still mean the same thing? And look, he’s an interesting guy. He’s an entrepreneur. He was at Tinder. He’s basically been a turnaround artist. He’s been there four years. And so what do you think? How much is Yahoo on your radar screen these days?
Stoller: It’s really not. But I will say that I have two friends who work at Yahoo Finance and Yahoo News, and they love it and tell me they do really good work over there. Other than the journalism part of it, and I use Yahoo Finance to check stocks. I use it for stuff like that. I don’t use it for search. I don’t use it for anything else. And it was kind of a brand that I had thought, you know, had its heyday back in the early 2000s and they had so many missed opportunities. They lost the chance to buy Facebook, they missed out on a bunch of other deals. And I just thought they were kind of stagnant.
Brady: But it lives to see a new day and like you, I’m very fond of the media properties, top notch journalists that they hire, I have to say. And look, I look forward to hearing what his vision is. You know, again, it’s, it’s past its 30th anniversary. As you pointed out, it’s still here, much like Ask Jeeves, which he also worked at.
Stoller: Yes, he was the CEO of that pre-Google, pre-ChatGPT.
Brady: So how do you turn around a legacy brand that has become a case study in failure. What does success look like? And it still has incredible traffic. So the bones, as he would say, are probably pretty good. Yeah, lots to talk about.
Stoller: We’ll be back with Jim after the break.
Brady: We’re entering an era of innovation unlike any we’ve witnessed before. You all see it: The pace of technological change is staggering, and it’s challenging for any leader to keep up. We spoke with Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, which is the longtime sponsor of this podcast. Here’s his advice for leaders on how to navigate this new world.
Jason Girzadas: There’s probably nothing more important for CEOs, no matter what organization they’re leading, to really be thinking about technology’s impact on our workforce. It’s really a function of, how do you think about technology in concert with your workforce? We at Deloitte talk about it as the age of width, the age of technology with your workforce, and really embracing this idea of the codependency of technology and workforce. We’re also an environment of a very tight workforce where there’s a scarcity of top talent. That’s going to be the challenge for organizations, to demonstrate to top talent that they can grow and evolve the work that they do, working with leading technology in a very aligned way. Finally, it’s what top talent really wants in an organization, is to learn and grow and to be part of an organization that’s supportive of them actually embedding technology in their work.
Brady: Jim, I think the first thing that would be good is define Yahoo as it is now, because obviously, it’s, you know, media, it’s been search, it’s email, it’s so many different—it’s a tech company. I mean, how do you define it in your mind?
Lanzone: It’s funny, and I’ve said this a couple times, but historically speaking, they would ask that question of the Yahoo CEO onstage at conferences.
Brady: Oh, well, here we are asking.
Lanzone: It’s a bit of a gotcha. So it’s a great first question. But because, you know, again, I think all the different ups and downs in the company and along the way as a public company, which there’s a lot of different pressure that came along with that, had to try to figure out what its way was going to be as the internet was evolving. And I can go into it, but our team picked it up after that, so we didn’t have all those pressures. You can step back and look at it when we picked it up, and understand, first of all, it’s a conglomerate of a lot of different products. Some of those products have media or or use media as a feature. Some are utilities, right, like search or email. Even within some products. So let’s take sports where we definitely have media. We have the number one NBA podcast, we have the number one combat sports podcast, we have the number one newsletter. But the spine of the book for sports is fantasy sports. You know, where we’re the OGs, you know, sports scores and things like that. And those are more products. So I think at the end of the day, Yahoo is a product company, and I can go all into product…
Brady: …a product conglomerate. A conglomerate of different products.
Lanzone: But that is common these days. If you think about Meta, right? You have Facebook, you have Instagram, you have WhatsApp, you have Oculus. Now, you have AI. Even Google, with anything from Android to Waze to Android to YouTube. Amazon, obviously, same thing. All of the major internet companies, and Yahoo, after all this time, is still a top five internet company in the US and globally. We get there as a combination of brands, but Yahoo—and my team, we had to figure this out when we got here, you know, after all this time. We just had our 30th anniversary this year, you know.
Brady: And you’re approaching your fourth.
Lanzone: Yeah, I started [at the] end of September of 2021, right after Apollo bought the company. But you know, what’s our reason for being? Like, why does Yahoo exist, and why has it been so successful through all the ups and downs? Why is it still so large and used? And you know, the answer to that was one answer, which is in all the categories where we were still at the top. So we’re number one in finance, number two in news, really number two in sports.
Brady: Doesn’t sound like much of a gotcha question, then.
Lanzone: Well, all of these categories where we were still at the top is—we were still fulfilling the founder’s original mission of the company, like back in 1995, which was to be the trusted guide, you know, through the Wild West of the internet. It’s just that that job changed between 1995 when you were just trying to find websites to get things done, all the way through to now, where you’re deploying things like AI to help people get things done, right? So how you do it changes, but what we do, being the trusted guide to the internet, doesn’t change.
Stoller: So I’m a kid of the ’90s, born almost around the time Yahoo was founded. So I remember it very vividly. I remember—also, I think it’s funny that this is very full circle for you, coming initially from Ask Jeeves, you were the CEO of that, and now coming back to an internet company, which is very full circle. So you’re right. I think Yahoo has gone through a bunch of ups, a bunch of downs, totally different than what it was in 1994. But I think that, you know, in the mid-2000s people were really worried about this company. And so when people came to you and said, “Hey, Jim, do you want to take this job?” What made you say, Yes, I will. I will do it in this uncertainty.”
Brady: Jim, I like a challenge lens.
Lanzone: Yeah. Well, I always wanted a crack at this. I knew every previous regime of this company, a lot of friends and colleagues who went through here….
Brady: …should we rate them all?
Lanzone: No, I mean all the different teams, like, you know, Jimmy Pitaro and Jeff Weiner and Brad Garlinghouse. You know, just the really original teams. You know, even the first team, because I really had two things…
Brady: …Jerry Yang?
Lanzone: Jerry Yang, who’s still involved with the company. I just had him back for an all-hands meeting. He was amazing, yeah, for the 30th. He’s an investor in the new version of the company after we spun out of Verizon. It’s really a new corporation. So it, yeah, and he invested in it. So it’s amazing. But no, I had done two startups in the ’90s, or was involved with two early-stage companies in the ’90s. So that led me to Ask Jeeves, that was my first turnaround, and I learned the hard way, like, why were we able to do that? And we, you know, I think we almost 50x the stock from where we picked it up at the crash, in 2001 to the peak of where we got to before we sold to IAC. And we had a lot of traffic, but we had a product that had seen better days, and a brand that had been through the ringer, and a team that had been also through it because it was the first crash. So you had to rebuild all that. And once you got the basics right and you got the team rebuilt, and you were actually executing on your basic value proposition, you know, then you could innovate. And we innovated our tails off in that time period, 2003 to 2007. We were, you know, we were the ones who innovated, who really created the [inaudible] approach to search. That was what we were known for. We were the first major partner of Google when they started to syndicate AdWords, and that really made us profitable.
Stoller: …and I used Jeeves like the OG ChatGPT, I would ask it so many questions.
Brady: I want to bring us up to 2025, I mean, like, but let me ask, because I do—think you mentioned turnarounds, and Ask Jeeves is just one of the many you’ve done. And what was it, to Kristin’s point, that you saw as the opportunity with Yahoo? Because we’ve just heard a litany, and it’s all very correct as to where you’re number one. Obviously, it’s also been a case study in what not to do. What did you see as the runway that you could create?
Lanzone: Well, remember that the—let’s say, the case study in what not to do, it was very interesting…
Brady: …don’t turn down Google.
Lanzone: Well, if you go do the forensics, which I did, if you are in the late 1990s early 2000s, search doesn’t have a business model yet, and you are the trusted guide to the internet, and there’s been a market crash and everything, outsourcing search to Google, and before that, they did [inaudible] me for the best price possible, which included a link to Google with their logo on the page that when you got there was only a search box, which is how 91% of internet sessions started at the time. That was like a good deal, just so happens that, you know, it really ceded search to Google, and I think the company spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it should be, and it went into media, and it tried to look at social, and it took another crack at search, and I mean, all kinds of things as a public company. It then eventually sold to Verizon in the mid-2010s. And so when we got it, it was after all that. So we had the luxury of not being public, but those basic ingredients were there, which was a huge audience, huge and very important categories. And so both Apollo, who bought the company, and then brought me in as CEO, and me, we, you know, I talked to them before they bought the company. Our thesis was, if you could get that asset at the right price, and it was around $5 billion and if you look around everybody in the top 10 Comscore internet companies, they’re all trillion-dollar companies. You could work with that. And so I, you know, again, I could go through it, but we set about the turnaround process using those raw ingredients, and that’s where we are today.
Stoller: What was the hardest decision you had to make when you took over? Was it cutting, restructuring, betting on a new product? What was really difficult for you?
Lanzone: Well, you knew all that coming in. You knew that there was gonna have to be some turnover on the team. You also, and this has been true every time I come into a new company, you also find a lot of talent and can redeploy them in new ways. So step one is always rebuilding the team, getting great people involved. You know, as a CEO, especially if something is big, you can’t do everything and so that always is step one, and, and so yeah, from there, there are certain products that, you know, like search or email that are huge and things you need to invest in to get back on track. And, and then ones where, you know, in the case of email, it hadn’t really been upgraded. And I mean, literally over a decade at those levels. And so when you start putting those things in place, you can start to get early returns. The hardest decision was probably how early on we had to essentially renovate our ad tech group, which was something that both AOL and Yahoo had spent many years acquiring a lot of companies, 30-plus companies.
Brady: What do you mean renovate? How does one renovate an ad tech group?
Lanzone: Well, we had to make some really hard decisions about what we’re going to invest in and where we didn’t have a right to win. And so we were doing a lot of things, a lot of different businesses. We had a native advertising business, we had a supply-side platform. And we shut those down. In some cases, we outsourced those to others, and then we decided, well, where we can win is our DSP, our demand-side platform, so we’re going to invest there. So that decision, my second year there, or, you know, actually made the decision before my first anniversary, required, you know, having a lot of people leave the company and doing deals to outsource things that we had been building for years. But that decision saved hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the cost side, but really strategically, let us refocus on put something that could really be a big asset creation opportunity, which is our DSP, where we are now the world’s largest private DSP, competing with trade desk, Google, Google’s version of that, Amazon’s version of that. And, you know, I think we’re still early days now and innovating in that space.
Brady: I want to talk about what’s ahead. But one of the things I like about your career, Jim, is the eclectic nature of it. And I know I’ve, I’ve had an eclectic career myself. One of the benefits is you get to work with all kinds of cool people. And I think of your career, you’ve got Les Moonves, you’ve got Barry Diller. You mentioned Jerry Yang. I mean, there’s so many different people. I’m curious who stands out for you as either a mentor or just somebody—I mean, these are personalities. I’ve met them myself, and how has that influenced you? And when you look back, who do you think of fondly, or maybe not so fondly? I mean, we’re open to both here.
Stoller: Yeah, give us all the dirt, Jim.
Lanzone: When you’ve been around doing this this long, and again, I’ve done consumer internet now for basically 28 years, and have had those different times. I can bore you with how many of those are influential on me.
Brady: No, go ahead. I want to hear.
Stoller: Name-drop, feel free.
Lanzone: When I left Barry and [unintelligible] I did a startup from scratch. And Bill Gurley, who wrote for Fortune for many years, and Jeff Yang were my two main investors. And the idea for that came from another big mentor of mine, Dave Goldberg, who was a very close friend, but also a huge mentor, we came up…
Brady: Yeah, I knew Dave. SurveyMonkey.
Lanzone: Well, he did SurveyMonkey when I went to do Clicker, but the whiteboard was in his EIR office, a benchmark of doing the future of video search and and then Blake Krikorian, another very close friend who passed away a year later, who was the founder of Slingbox, was also on the board of that startup, and was a huge friend, but also a huge mentor, you know, of mine. Yeah, you learn different things from all of them along the way, and, and obviously, with Barry, you know, I remember, we were in the back of a car, and I’ve always been fascinated by, well, by media, but also by, like, the history of things. And so I would always pepper him, like, how did you greenlight Airplane? And I get the story about he and Michael Eisner, you know, had offices next to each other, and he heard laughs coming out. And you know, they both had been reading the script. And he says, but before that was The Kentucky Fried Movie. And I mean, you just hear this history of how they do these things. And I remember him saying to me, you know, this is in the back of the car in like, 2007, I wonder if we started today, if we would have been as successful. And obviously, 18 years later,the answer is, of course. Barry Diller is one of the world’s best entrepreneurs, it turns out, you know, over the last 30 years. But his way of drilling into the core idea of things. Always, I remember him saying, there’s always another way around the mountain. And I always say that to my team, if we get stuck on something,
Brady: You know, he told me once, the hardest thing to hire for is curiosity, which always stuck with me, because he’s right, and you’re very curiosity-driven. That’s the way you talk to people, isn’t it? You mentioned, you just go and you try to get to know them.
Lanzone: Well, that’s part of his drilling down on, on the core idea, you know, and not just going just off the data, which, again, is also very important. I’m a product person at heart, you know, if I take a new job, drilling into the data is probably the first thing I do. But between him, less, where, you know who ran, obviously, that company very successfully as a public company. But what was also the number one?
Brady: This is when you were at CBS Interactive?
Lanzone: At CBS Interactive, and knowing that it also was about gut and the core idea, and I’ve other friends, like Tony Fadell, who helped…
Brady: …with Nest…
Lanzone: … with Nest but also created the iPod and helped create the iPhone. And there’s a lot of it that is the art side too. And I really believe in the right-brain side of this, the taste side of this. And in the early stages of a turnaround, you can’t always show that side, but then you always get to the point, right? At CBS, the initial challenge was they had bought CNET, which was a struggling public company, and it needed to be turned around first. The reward for that was we created CBS All Access, which was one of the first streaming platforms, and we launched that in 2014, five years before HBO Max and Disney+ and that was at the end of the day, a gut decision. We got criticized when we launched that, that it wasn’t going to work, and how dare one network have its own streaming service? So, yeah, I’ve learned that both of those are very important.
Stoller: For us, I feel like, or at least for me, and maybe you, Diane, when I think Yahoo, I immediately think media. And I think it’s just, you know, we’re journalists. We have all these…
Brady: Not email? My sister still has her Yahoo email account.
Stoller: Yeah, as I told you earlier, I was a CompuServe girl then an AOL, so sorry, Jim.
Lanzone: Still have all of those URLs.
Stoller: Yeah, exactly. But I’m wondering about, you know, from a non-journalist perspective, how do you kind of view the media industry at Yahoo and just in general, how are you looking at what’s next for your journalists?
Lanzone: Yeah, well, part of what we figured out when we got here was, again, you do the forensics on the company. What makes it successful. The history of why Yahoo even got into media at all was not by being investigative journalists or on the enterprising side of news, but by being the first and best aggregator of news and being a partner to people like Fortune, by sending them traffic, sharing the revenue. It’s funny to see AI companies now trying to ink those deals. We have 1000s of those deals that go back 20+ years with companies. We still operate that way today. If you go to our page, we are sending traffic to Business Insider who would have, you know, those stories and help them be successful. We then, you know, accentuate that with our own journalists who are providing context to that. Whether it’s sports or Brian and Julie and team in finance, that really is where Yahoo is strong, and how we do journalism. And over the last three years, as we figure out what’s our role in that ecosystem, I think our role is to be the trusted guide, to be purple, to be neutral, and to help our users wherever they may fall on any spectrum, get to the content that they’re looking for and be partners with people.
Brady: Asset-light. It sounds like an asset-light strategy. If I look at the humans as assets, does that position you well, for the next generation of where we go with media?
Lanzone: Well, we do—look, we also have a lot of humans…
Brady: …we know several…
Stoller: …yeah, I know two of them!
Lanzone: If you come up to our studio, uptown, we have an amazing studio, and, you know, by the end of this year we’ll be doing 50 hours a week of original programming just in sports. So we also are producing media, but again, I would say, in service of helping our users accomplish their goals. And that is a little bit different, right? Because in finance, they’re trying to make money or save money. In sports, they are trying to beat the snot out of their friends in fantasy, or they’re trying to be a smarter fan about their team that they’re following. It always is in service of something that our users are trying to get done. And so I would just say our role in the ecosystem of media is, I think it’s very important, because we have a huge amount of traffic, and we send a huge amount of traffic, and we’re very thoughtful about how we do that and what that product needs to look like, and how we partner to keep it a very healthy media ecosystem. We’re big believers in that. If we violate trust with our users, and I would say over time, that is something that you know, probably as the different variations of Yahoo and different owners of Yahoo, it probably wavered a bit, but we knew that is the first thing. Like, we have to be the trusted source for people, and that means we also have to have trusted partners. Like, we can’t be sending people to click bait or to attention vampires who are just trying to get you. We got to send them to the highest quality content.
Stoller: It seems like you have competitors in a bunch of different spaces. You have, like Google, dare I say, you have other media competitors like Fortune.
Brady: And AI. I keep waiting for the deepfake news call, right?
Stoller: Yeah. I think you know, what they’re going to do to search is wild. Who do you view as, like, your biggest competitors? And how are you fighting back?
Lanzone: Well when we did the original Google deal in 2002, Eric Schmidt, people said, “How could you do that?” I mean, we were the fourth-ranked search engine. We survived everybody else.
Stoller: So people were questioning it back then?
Lanzone: Oh yeah, how could you do that? And Eric had the term “co-opetition,” and…
Brady: …as he would…
Lanzone: …but we were public and they weren’t. So we were almost their tracking stock for the first couple of years, and so, yeah, I mean, we helped each other on that front, and maybe we competed for users. But from our standpoint, we always had to have a unique reason for being relative to them. That’s true of anything that I’ve ever run. You know, CBS products, Yahoo products, I mean, they all have to be unique. So that’s how I think about it. If you talk to my team, though, you would hear every single one of our team say the same thing, which is we really don’t get distracted by competition. You have to keep tabs, obviously, on the way the ecosystem is changing. When I took this job in September ’21 it was still 14 months before ChatGPT launched. That changed the world. That created opportunities and threats for us. I think they’re more market driven then, instead of individual companies and products necessarily. And we think about taking over Yahoo, we have so much to do that I really think we’re competing against ourselves more than we are anybody else, at least for now. We’ve just so many things, if we get those right, that we will keep growing. We are growing a really healthy clip again now, and so that’s really what I focus on.
Brady: So let’s talk about that a little bit. And I want to unpack your background a bit more too. But where, you said it’s early days, what are you focused on right now? I mean in terms of your priorities, the pain points. I mean, what should we be expecting in terms of what’s around the corner. Because you’re private, you can tell us..
Lanzone: That’s been great. I still think of myself as an entrepreneur at core and a founder, but I’ve been wound up in all these public companies and larger companies. It does feel good to be able to do this in private for a while and in Apollo, as the, you know, full owners of Yahoo, we have some other investors, but it really is an Apollo company, they’ve been great. Because we were one of the fastest returning deals in the history of Apollo, and that’s enabled us to be all upside. And so they really have been letting us do this right and play a little bit of a longer game than you might get normally in private equity. And so I think about that product by product, and in terms of, like, what we do, you know from here. And I would say we are—the reason I think it’s still early days is step one was just fixing the things that were wrong. And you’d be surprised, like, how little this company, even on the very back end, had moved to the cloud. I’m just saying something as basic as…
Brady: Even with Verizon as an owner, I’m surprised by that.
Lanzone: You’d be surprised. And now I would say, is every pixel of that something that I want to put my name next to and say that is the best product that that can be? No. You know, I think there are 10 levels left to go here on what we can do. And I also always tell the team we can’t just be brats. And, you know, I always say skip levels of the video game, you know, you got to earn it every level by every level, to earn the right to innovate and progress. Now with AI, that’s added a whole other set of things that we need to do. I feel like we’ve been out ahead of that. We were one of the first ones to integrate, let’s say, AI into email to help people create, search, edit their mail. There are other, you know, parts of that that are coming. You know, same thing in search. Even things like fantasy sports have AI integrated to help you manage your team. There’s even a smack talking email that comes out, you know, from AI every Sunday night, whether you won or lost. Thinking about finance, you know this category and how it helps you build your portfolio. So besides the basics, we have to do that, and then there’s innovation and our hopes and dreams for where all these products can go next. I’d also lastly say the brand is another very important part of this, because the Yahoo brand did go through the ringer for a lot of years.
Lanzone: That exclamation point used to always piss me off.
Stoller: I like it.
Lanzone: Yeah, people love it.
Brady: It used to, now I have a different view.
Stoller: So is it a marketing push to revamp a brand, or, how do you revamp a brand that kind of, as you said, went through the ringer?
Lanzone: I mean, it takes time. Yeah, you really have to earn that. And again, having seen that movie a few times. The thing about Yahoo that is awesome, is that even though there is a bit of that, you know, that history and so people are going to want to ask that question, and we’re going to really have to earn it. There’s also this interesting latent kind of love for the brand that is in there and people, especially as you kind of get out of the Valley a bit, and I think the Valley has started to feel good about what we’ve been doing with the company. But to get to the, let’s say the average American, there is some latent love in there if you do it right. And including, you know, half of our audience today is Gen Z and millennials.
Brady: You have a massive audience, we will point that out.
Stoller: Half of them weren’t born when Yahoo was created,
Lanzone: Yeah, and so, so everybody’s using Yahoo at a certain point in time, and we’re top five, we touch 90% of all the U.S. any given month. But again, as a brand, you have to earn that right to where they’re proud to be using Yahoo and be talking about it. And so that’s brick by brick, over time. And we, you know, we’ve started down that pathway. Step one, you have to have great products. If you don’t have that, people are going to talk smack about the brand, let alone love it. But I think we’re on the pathway there. And then we, you know, we started with small things up to big things. On the small side, through a really interesting event at South by Southwest, where we partnered with this retro, kitschy brand called Poolsuite, and we had a ’90s-vibe party that everyone was like, “Oh, this is the coolest party in South by Southwest. I can’t believe it’s Yahoo.”
Stoller: You’re leaning into the ’90s cheese I love.
Lanzone: And that was, like a small one. On the larger end, we did a Super Bowl ad this year for the first time in 23 years, but we did it in a super unique way, where we weren’t asking for anything. We weren’t trying to market our way to success. It was just getting the brand back out there. And again, we did it uniquely. We had Bill Murray. Bill Murray is a very unique character. We only bought the ad locally, so it was actually very cost-effective as well. And then the ad was really just a 15-second teaser that got people into an online experience using Yahoo Mail, where you would email back and forth with Bill Murray, and he would send you additional videos that were vignettes that told this story that he wrote with his writing partners.
Stoller: How’d you convince Bill Murray to do it?
Brady: He’s everywhere. He’s a good guy.
Lanzone: Harder than you think. It was only the second ad he’s ever done.
Stoller: What was the pitch? How’d you do it?
Lanzone : Actually, he famously has no agent and no manager, and you have to call a 1-800 number. We somehow worked it through to get his attention and explain it to him. And Bill is interesting. He likes the underdog, and he loved the idea of working with Yahoo to help us kind of fight back. And I would argue, he almost really took us under his wing. Another example of that is that one of the things that they conceived of was that he would answer those emails live on camera at halftime. And up until the day before the game, we didn’t know if it was gonna happen. I mean, he really, he’s a busy guy. He was like in a band. He played a concert the night before.
Brady: Can he type that fast? I don’t even know.
Lanzone: So not only did he do it, but we announced it only 20 minutes before it happened through social channels. And we end up getting millions of people up against the Kendrick Lamar halftime show tuning in to watch Bill on camera, and he would, he was actually like, talking to the user who emailed in, and he would answer it live. He would do it into a microphone. He was saying what he…
Brady: The beauty of improv.
Lanzone: Yeah. And then he continued to do it the entire second half. Didn’t have, didn’t have to do it. And so it was a personal thing for Bill. And so, yeah, so I’m still in touch with him. He’s an amazing guy.
Brady: I can picture you. The Yahoo CEO sort of emailing Bill Murray and getting good advice from him.
Lanzone: He wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t authentic. And I think, again, if I were to say what the take on rehabilitating the brand has to be, is it has to be authentic. We can’t be too thirsty about wanting attention or trying to classically market your way there.
Brady: You know, one of the benefits of working in different roles, starting companies, you discover what you’re good at. You know, when, when did you discover that you were particularly good at the things that you think are helping you in this role?
Lanzone: That’s a great question. The whole way I started doing this was I went to law school. I hated it. I would have left, but I met my wife the first minute of law school…
Brady: …stick around to court each other…
Lanzone: …we were living together two weeks later, and that was 31 years ago. We’ve been together that whole time. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t have stayed. And I had some friends who did the business school program, so I, with no experience, applied and got in, and that summer, somehow wound up working for a company that was digital in the old school way. They sold public records to like, law firms and, you know, businesses and private detectives whenever, through dial up. And my job was to get them an internet website. And the CEO thought I was, you know, I was an early adopter of the internet, obviously, and used it a lot. So I copied the fantasy baseball website that I used at the time, and we turned that into, by the end of the year, a top 100 website. I worked with the engineers to build it. I did all the PR. I put the ads on the page. I did everything. And so that led to me joining a startup while I was still in school, and we raised money and so I was always a product person. So I’ve always come at this, when I got to Ask, I was the head of product. Our turnaround was so successful that my boss, Steve Berkowitz, who was the CEO, got hired to run all of internet for Microsoft. Satya [Nadella] reported to him, and that’s how I got promoted to CEO. So I only got, you know, I never really applied for a job. I always started companies that have been acquired, and in this case, I was part of Apollo’s research team, essentially for whether you should do Yahoo. But I come at this as a product person, as a founder, not as big boss man corporate, you know, person. And I think the best internet companies are still or technology companies are still run that way. Whether you are the founder, you’re not. My job is to push to be the, you know, to determine whether something is good enough, and to really drive that, obviously, to help set the strategy and the roadmap, but to be a source of momentum. And you know, that grind of doing a startup or doing a turnaround, that’s all I’ve ever done. And so the way to do that is you push and with great people around you, and that that’s what we do.
Stoller: If you could go back in time and give advice to Yahoo’s leadership, you know, during the dotcom boom, what would you want to say to them as a CEO today?
Lanzone: I really, I mean this in a non…
Brady: …buy Facebook…
Lanzone: …well, here’s the thing, not everybody, if everyone can hear the whisper, everybody tried to buy Google. Ask Jeeves tried to buy Google. They couldn’t hit the number. So they bought a company called Direct Hit, which actually was the inventor of all user behavior algorithms that that Ask eventually licensed to Google. So there’s always another way around the mountain if you don’t get it.
Brady: Success comes in many forms.
Lanzone: I really don’t know that any of us can put ourselves in the position of a public company, of the biggest internet company in the year 2000. The market crashed, I think, in March of 2000. We were writing our S1 to go public, my startup, though, and then one by one, everything crashed. So AltaVista didn’t get out. And then this happened. So how do you go back and tell them not to outsource search to Google, right? Or if you do make it white label, don’t give them a link and a logo.
Brady: I remember Priceline was having us bid for groceries and web fans. So things change. But well, let’s put you then circa 2025, and you are in a big legacy brand. If you were starting out now, you know, entrepreneurial as you are, what would you be doing? Would you be doubling down on, you know, some of the AI companies—because here we are at the dawn, you know, we had the internet, we had 2.0 and here we are at the dawn of a whole new age of innovation. Obviously, you’re navigating through that, trying to bring in those tools and that innovation. But what would you be doing at this point, starting out?
Lanzone: Man, there’s so many ways. I would be founding a company, you know, and it would have to be in the AI space, obviously, from my background. And by the way, my son has now just turned 24 and it’s his second year out of college. He’s a programmer at an AI startup. Called Meeno…
Brady: …and shoutout to Meeno, well done, son.
Lanzone: But by the way, there are others. So you know, one of my longtime colleagues, who’s a board member, has a very successful startup called Array that has defined the next generation of labor, and is deploying, you know, real people and humans. You know, they talk about manufacturing, moving to China and needing to bring it back. There’s already a lot of great people in the US doing this. His company does that. It definitely deploys AI and technology. But starting great companies doesn’t have to be that, but if it was me, of course, it’s too…
Brady: …but you’re also trying to recruit great talent. So why do they want to come to Yahoo right now?
Lanzone: Look, a lot of places you go, first of all, you’re going to be a cog in the machine. So a lot of people who come here, and by the way, it’s a lot easier to recruit in year three than it was in year one. You know, we’ve had, we’ve got some momentum now, so we’ve got some people’s attention. And by the way, as an example, we will get at least 1,000 applications for every person that we hire as an engineer. So we do get a lot of incoming, but it’s to be able to have that impact. Number one is, personally, they can have that impact. Number two, we have, you know, one of the top five largest audiences in the US and globally, to actually deploy the thing that you’re building, which is the hardest part of any consumer internet startup, is actually getting a real audience and we start with that as kind of a late stage startup. Again, we already have that audience, so that really does attract people.
Stoller: Jim, I have a bit of a fun one for you, because I can tell that you are a very good storyteller. Besides getting to email and meet Bill Murray, what is the wildest or most unexpected thing that you have done as CEO at Yahoo, or just coolest that you want to tell us about?
Lanzone: The Bill Murray one must have…
Stoller: Is that top five?
Lanzone: Yeah, would have been. I mean, I’ll tell you an interesting brand moment. I was sitting in Levi’s Stadium, which is the 49ers’ home, and I’m a longtime season ticket holder, and…
Brady: Condolences, I’m just kidding.
Stoller: You’re doing very well.
Lanzone: Oh, the Niners, it’s been a great run. Super Bowl is next.
Brady: Never mind.
Stoller: Clearly we don’t know sports.
Lanzone: We’ve been robbed a couple times. But I was sitting there and I guess I didn’t realize this before I took the job. But every time the Niners score a touchdown, up on the screen it turns into a Yahoo, a Yahoo Sports highlight of the touchdown at the end, there’s actually a yodel with the logo going across the page, and all 80,000 people scream Yahoo at the top of their lungs in a yodel and in the middle of Silicon Valley. And that’s when I knew there was something to work with here, brand wise, that it could be done.
Stoller: Had you planned the Yahoo yodel, is that a thing?
Lanzone: No, I inherited that. That was a deal that was done 10 years prior, during Marissa’s time, and I renewed it. And because it’s just such a, it’s such a great moment. That was such a surprise, for sure.
Stoller: I slightly want to ask you to re-create the yodel right here. But I feel like…
Brady: …no, let’s do it.
Lanzone: We do have, you know, the “easy button.” Yeah, we do have yodel button easy buttons.
Stoller: Oh, that’s good branding.
Lanzone: Hilariously, they are—we have an amazing social team, and they’ve done things like for April Fools, this year. They created a, if you know about the touch grass, they created a keyboard that was all covered in grass, everything. But another thing they do is they actually, for a limited time offer, they sold those yodel buttons on there…
Brady: …Okay, we have to do the yodel…
Lanzone: …they sold out in five minutes, like $20 each.
Stoller: Who’s buying these?
Lanzone: That was another, you know, surprising time for sure.
Brady: Sounds like a lot of fun over there.
Stoller: Would you ever change the yodel? Is it too iconic?
Lanzone: We did, in a way that you wouldn’t have noticed. We shortened it by two seconds.
Brady: Oh, so then was it Yahoo. Come on, why am I the one doing the Yahoo yodel? You’re the Yahoo CEO.
Lanzone: It’s too—it’ll get clipped by my team and used against me at company all hands meetings. Look, even having Jerry, you know, Jerry back this year, and showing a picture of the trailer that he and David founded the company in. Or, you know, we actually showed him that, not only are we back to his original mission, and how we’ve articulated that kind of made him well up a little bit. But the original Yahoo website, the one that was pre-incorporation. So you said ’94. Incorporation was ’95 but they did have a website available in 1994. It said, “Jerry and David’s guide to the World Wide Web…always under construction.” And we took that and we made it like the number one core operating principle for us that Yahoo, you know, look, we’re still here after 30 years, a lot of ups and downs. We have some ups now, and we’re on the right track. But if you couldn’t, you know, kill us before, we’re on a track now where you could see another 30 years if we do this, if we do this right. So always under construction to us, meant that, you know, everything about technology may change, right? Think about from the original time: video now, and social and AI, and just all the different parts of this. We still have to help people accomplish their goals…
Brady: …make sense of the world…
Lanzone: …we always have to be adapting, and that really is guiding how we think about the company.
Brady: I’m thinking of Glengarry Glen Ross, “always be closing.” Different concept. You know, one thing that I feel bonds us all here, and you know, Oura should really give us product placement money, but we’re all wearing Oura rings for those who can’t [see]. And so I often think of the fact that to be a CEO these days is to be an elite athlete. And Kristin and I are not putting ourselves in your category, of course, but talk about how you manage your day, your energy, because I certainly look at my ratings every morning and consider my sleep and my energy.
Lanzone: How’d you do last night?
Brady: I never do well. I don’t like—but I…
Stoller: She never wants to answer the number question with sleep, by the way.
Lanzone: Well, I think today was seventy-something.
Lanzone: How much REM sleep did you get?
Stoller: I only got 23% last night. It’s pretty good, right?
Brady: I operate on a different wavelength, perhaps.
Lanzone: My wife and I also have Eight Sleep and it’s amazing, too. And it gives you a whole other score.
Brady: I do think about the fact that it feels like, the attention to the physicality of the job and health, and obviously there’s many factors, but how do you manage that? And do you feel like you do it differently? First of all, you’ve got tools, and you’re wearing this ring on your finger. And how was your sleep last night? I’d be remiss not to ask you.
Lanzone: Took me a while to fall asleep, then I crushed it after that. I think I had two hours, two solid hours of REM. That was like a lot. A funny side story is that Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura, and I, were entrepreneurs in residence at Redpoint Ventures in 2008 when I left IC. We were the only two, and we were in the bullpen together. Way back when…
Brady: So is this you supporting your friend or do you actually like it?
Lanzone: And then he worked at SurveyMonkey. So if you’ve been around a long time…
Stoller: You know ’em all.
Lanzone: Yeah, yeah. So no, look, I’ve gone through my fits. And so, you know, when you have kids for the first time, your [in your] ’30s and everything changes, you don’t realize, and you have to get your act together about staying in shape. And if you do something that you love, you work a lot. In this job, I also just travel a ton. I’m just on the road a lot for different events and conferences and for ad sales, and, you know, whatever it is to our different offices. So it’s harder.
Brady: Do you have any hacks you want to share? I don’t, so.
Lanzone: Honestly, I think it is just the same as the grind of running a company. And again, I saw in a different podcast, you asked somebody about a book, the book that I always go back to is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. If anyone wants to think that Nike happened overnight or they were just brand geniuses. I mean, it took years of building that company. And I think any company is like that, early stage, late stage, if you’re doing it right. I think it’s the same thing with your health. It’s the same thing with staying in touch with friends. Nothing’s just going to happen. You have to make it happen. And that could be getting on the treadmill or the elliptical or lifting weights or going for a run. It could be spending time with your spouse. It could be spending time with your kids. I make a really big effort not just to do that, but my mom passed away a couple years ago, so I spent a lot of time with my dad, you know, but also friends. And so, you know, I’ve gone to two live concerts in the last week.
Stoller: Which ones? Did you go to Avril Lavigne on Friday?
Lanzone: Well, the last one I went to, no, on Friday night, I was—well, I’m on the board of the Newport Folk Festival and Jazz Festival, which is like my passion project, and I’ve done that for about 10 years. So that’s more my jam on the music side. So I was at, there’s a band called The Hold Steady. Their lead singer is Craig Finn. He has a solo album that just came out. So his album release party was Friday night at the Bowery Ballroom. And Kathleen Edwards, who’s this amazing folk indie singer out of Canada, opened and played in the band. They had like an-all star band, the guy from war on drugs was in it. And so my wife and I, we did date night and went, went to that.
Brady: Newport Folk Festival. So, I mean, I always think of that now with the Bob Dylan movie. But of course, you know, so you’re a folk fan, that’s interesting, yeah.
Lanzone: Well that, you have to go look at some of the YouTube videos, the movie isn’t exactly how that happened.
Stoller: No, I knew that. Well, I read the book, and I was like, Yes, it’s very different.
Brady: We vilified Pete Seeger too much, perhaps, or…
Lanzone: …it was funny how it all works. You know, one of my biggest mentors in life, who was a CBS board member, was a guy named Bruce Gordon, who was the chairman of Newport. We actually live across the hall from each other in New York as well. So Bruce and his wife are our family here in New York, but I was also friends before he passed away with George Wein, who’s the founder. He was the creator of the Music Festival. He got a Grammy for creating—so if you go to Coachella or anything, it was because of George launching Newport Jazz originally, and then the Newport Folk. But yeah, hearing the old stories again, I love it, and hearing about Miles Davis and Nina Simone, or how he had to get Led Zeppelin to play acoustic to chill the crowd out so like a riot wouldn’t happen, or what happened for real with Bob Dylan. Like you got all those—he just passed away a couple years ago at 96 but getting all the stories…
Stoller: Well now that we’ve taken this podcast completely out…
Brady: I sense the joy. Where do you get the most joy out of your job? You get a lot of joy out of life, I sense.
Lanzone: Well, I definitely do, but I love, you know, my kids are always worried about how much I work, and I love it.
Brady: You never work a day again if you love what you do.
Lanzone: I mean, again it’s the first—in some ways, you’re always working in a job like this. I mean, first of all, this wasn’t easy. It’s not an easy one. There’s also just a lot to it. Because if you go back to the conglomerate, there’s just so many different things that we do. There’s so many people—I love this team. I’ve always just been lucky to have great teams that are not just great at what they do, but just we always kind of, we’ve always wound up having a cultural situation where we just all love hanging out and we have that. So I’m always, in some ways, dipping in and out of work but again, it’s also one reason is just—I truly am never, this probably annoys the team, but I’m kind of just never satisfied. And think there’s always some other thing to do, or something we can do better, or something on the roadmap that we need to get to. And so I’m just always, my brain’s just always firing on those things.
Stoller: Jim, I’m going to ask you later outside of the studio about the Newport Folk Festival lineup, because I’m really excited about it this year. But before we go, is there anything that we haven’t asked you that you wanted to share with us or tell us about? Oh…
Lanzone: Oh man, I wouldn’t know. We’d have to look at the comments to know whether we did or whether we were annoying people.
Brady: But always interactive with the audience. But paint us a little bit of a vision for what you want Yahoo to be. I mean, take us out as far as you want. But obviously you said it’s early days. So tell us what, what’s your hope and aspiration there?
Lanzone: Let’s just say there’s the company piece, and then there’s the product piece, and I’d say, or even the brand piece. So yeah, I hope we can get the brand back on the map in a way where we reward that kind of latent love that I think that always has been out there across generations, you know. And it may be that it’s a bit of a vintage, modern-vintage brand if you are younger, but I think we can earn that. You know, other brands have done that. I think Chris has done an amazing job with that, New Balance is one example. There’s no reason if our products are great that we couldn’t do the same thing. The company’s on a great track. I’d love to deliver for our investors and for our team to reward that, whatever that winds up meaning, you know. All pre-IPO companies is you either go public or you get bought someday by someone who needs what you have. I think we’re building a lot and have a lot of things others might need. So that all needs to happen. But again, most of my day is going to be on the product side, and that evolution, everything is obviously changing now, more than it ever has probably. I mean, I know, talking to some people, they said, Oh, it’s bigger than the dawn of the internet, but others think it’s, it could be bigger than the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. I mean, it could, it remains to be seen, but if you go, if you just stick to what users need, really need, not technology for technology’s sake. I saw this tweet. I can’t remember who did it, but she said, “I don’t want AI to create art so that I have time to do my laundry. I want AI to do my laundry so that I have time to make art.”
Brady: Good luck with that
Lanzone: And I think, we can’t be judgmental on our side about what our users need to get done, big or small. We need to create these products to help them do that. That’s clearly evolving. More and more is going to happen in an automated way, helping you do things that you need done, maybe before you knew that they needed to be done. Or what that next step is in that pathway. In the categories we operate in now, and I would say, if we do this right, we will earn the right to do it in other categories as well. That’s where I want to get to. That’s what will create true loyalty, you know, and trust in our brand. So I don’t know if that sounds cheesy.
Lanzone: Thank you for joining us. I look forward to it. Appreciate spending the time. Thanks. You.
Brady: Leadership Next is produced and edited by Ceylan Ersoy.
Stoller: Our executive producer is Lydia Randall.
Brady: Our head of video and audio is Adam Banicki.
Stoller: Our theme is by Jason Snell.
Brady: Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. I’m Diane Brady.
Stoller: And I’m Kristin Stoller.
Brady: See you next time.
Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasters and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
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