What Did Jim Lanzone Do in His First Six Months at Yahoo?

Jim Lanzone says Yahoo was his third turnaround. Ask Jeeves was the first, during the web 1.0 crash. A 1990s startup he helped found was bought by Ask. He worked up from product to CEO, the stock rose 50 times, and the company was sold to Barry Diller. He stayed three more years. CBS Interactive was the second. That group had bought public internet companies that were not performing, and he says it went from 70 million to 220 million unique users.

He had just done a version of this at Tinder, starting in July 2020, when the team barely met in person. Yahoo already had the hard part, traffic, and the products had seen better days after the Verizon years. He does not arrive guns blazing. The first six months are for the team, the data, and how the products and the audience actually work, because the outside view is never quite right.