How Did Yahoo Return Apollo's Capital So Fast?

Jim Lanzone says Yahoo has paid back pretty much the price Apollo paid, and that this is public. He calls it one of the fastest returning deals in Apollo's history. The AOL sale was part of it. He did not feel pressure to do it quickly. Reed Rayman and the Apollo team built a deal whose early pieces returned cash fast, and Jim had spent the months before the close aligned with them on which assets were not going to make it. He describes the company, after that return, as playing with house money for whatever upside is left.

The goal he states is to go public. He talks about Yahoo the way he would about any later-stage company that is still private. About 75 percent of users come directly, rather than through search-engine traffic, which he says is one of the highest shares on the internet, and on a given day about 75 percent are logged in. That loyalty is why he says Yahoo advertising produces outcomes, and why a head-to-head test of the demand-side platform won 9 times out of 10 on first-party data.