Jim Lanzone took over Yahoo in September 2021, a corporation whose name once epitomised the internet’s go-go attitude but has since devolved into a joke. In disheartening news, the search engine behemoth (once it was) has finalised an agreement to sell TechCrunch, the well-established technology news website, to the investment firm Regent. As Yahoo keeps on divesting TechCrunch, the move also aligns with the tech giant’s focus on core consumer properties like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, and Yahoo Finance.
TechCrunch, founded in 2005, is known as a platform providing extensive coverage of Silicon Valley startups and technology trends. While the digital media outlet saw its ownership change from AOL to Verizon, the acquisition also gives Regent an opportunity to expand its portfolio of tech-focused media outlets. This follows Regent’s recent acquisition of Foundry, which encompasses publications such as PCWorld, Macworld, and TechAdvisor.
In a lengthy succession of management changes, Jim Lanzone took the CEO position from the new private-equity owner, Apollo Global Management, which had purchased the property from Verizon, the most recent and arguably most inexperienced caretaker (high bar alert). When I see him at the company’s New York City offices, I ask him why he accepted the position. He claims, “I adore turnarounds.”
Lanzone’s resume attests to this. In 2001, he took over AskJeeves, a sinking search property whose share price had dropped from a peak of $196 to less than a dollar. He rebuilt it to the point where Barry Diller’s IAC Corp purchased it for $1.85 billion.
He brought the traditional Tiffany network into the era of streaming while he was at CBS Interactive and later CBS’s head digital office in the 2010s. This month marks Yahoo’s 30th anniversary, which could be its toughest test yet. A public company that was once valued at well over $100 billion was sold to a private equity firm for $5 billion in 2021, partly because of its history of missed chances.
Mark Zuckerberg reportedly agreed to sell Facebook for $1 billion after Yahoo famously declined to buy Google. However, the transaction was cancelled after the then-CEO Terry Semel requested to renegotiate. The WhatsApp founders were among the talented individuals who left Yahoo.
Promising purchases such as Flickr, Tumblr, and Huffington Post were discarded at fire-sale prices. Yahoo was not a top focus for its owner, Verizon, in recent years. Rather than attempting to restore its purple glory, it combined Yahoo’s assets with those of another fallen icon, AOL, and called the new brand Oath.
Some people thought Lanzone had no chance. George Bradt, one of those MBA types who write for Forbes, remarked, “It’s hard to believe anyone else on the planet wants any part of his role.”
Jim Lanzone noticed a change. He considered Yahoo to be an undiscovered treasure.
“If you could remove the name Yahoo from it, you saw billions of dollars in revenue in 2021,” he continues.
Jim Lanzone is not very patient with exhuming past mistakes. He claims that the narrative of Yahoo’s lost potential is stale. “It’s dull.” Rather than lamenting over lost search glory, Lanzone focused on making Yahoo better. He claims, “We didn’t have to worry about what we weren’t.”
In order to move Yahoo Sports into the gambling era, he quietly made several purchases to strengthen the greatest properties, such as the sports betting app Wagr, and eliminated money-losing areas, such as some nonperforming ad tech departments. Additionally, he hired competent executives, such as Ryan Spoon, the current CEO of Yahoo Sports and a former digital head at ESPN.
He claims that Yahoo has produced the fastest return of any Apollo acquisition since he has increased earnings and expanded the company’s audience to that extent. Yahoo’s exact financials are unavailable due to its private nature.
However, Yahoo’s communications team sent a long paper full of information to support Lanzone’s assertion that Yahoo still has a lot to offer. Yahoo is ranked number one in news, number one in finance, and number three in sports by traffic-measuring marketing firm Comscore. In mail, it’s ranked second only to Gmail. He states that “hundreds of millions” of people use Yahoo each month in the United States alone.
The launch of ChatGPT, a year after Lanzone took over, completely changed the tech landscape. In past search, social, and mobile transitions, Yahoo has a near-perfect track record of making these mistakes.
Although Lanzone says Yahoo won’t be investing $100 billion in data centres or developing its own language models, he still thinks the company will take advantage of the opportunity.
He states, “I want to automate the word ‘AI’ so I don’t have to say it so much.”
Yahoo utilises AI technologies developed by other companies while also leveraging its own machine-learning capabilities. For example, it collaborates with the firm Sierra on robot customer support representatives.
Acquiring Artifact, the AI-powered news aggregator developed by Instagram cofounders Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom, in 2024 was one of Jim Lanzone’s most astute AI strategies. When the couple declared it would close after determining it would not be a profitable venture, Lanzone was one of several bidders fighting for the underlying technology.
Artifact’s mission was focused on delivering the most relevant stories to users through AI, utilising proprietary technology to provide curated news and content experiences. The tech behemoth saw this investment as a game-changing one, in terms of advancing its commitment to bringing trusted news and information to hundreds of millions of users globally, while accelerating its vision to offer a more personalised experience for discovering news and information across platforms.
“Instagram’s co-founders built a powerful and useful tool for recommending news to readers—but could never quite get it to scale. Yahoo has hundreds of millions of readers—but could use a dose of tech-forward cool to separate it from all the internet’s other news aggregators. And so, the two sides are joining forces,” David Pierce, a veteran in covering consumer tech for renowned media houses like The Wall Street Journal and WIRED, commented about the deal in April 2024.
In the words of Kat Downs Mulder, the general manager for Yahoo News, “They put a ton of love and care into the way that their content taxonomy and recommendation systems work. How the content is categorised, what signals feed into that content, how to identify what’s really working and can connect and is relevant to you, and then the UX of connecting the user with that content—that whole journey is really hard to get right.”
She also noted in 2024 that Yahoo was working on personalisation and recommendations, but Artifact built something “special.”
When Yahoo revamped its homepage earlier in 2025, it became the focal point.
“Rather than integrating their technology into our product, we did it the other way around,” Lanzone explains.
“Yahoo News is basically now an Artifact. We partnered with Yahoo because they made a compelling offer, but they also intended to reach millions of people with our hard work,” Systrom explains.
Yahoo Finance, the industry leader in consumer financial tools and maybe the company’s crown jewel, is the next to undergo an AI-driven makeover.
According to Jim Lanzone, product improvements have already helped him. He claims that Yahoo is now concentrating more on data and is no longer attempting to compete with CNBC in the finance news space. However, a more significant makeover is being planned. He claims that “we will use AI to do that for you, and you’re going to make more money and save more money.”
Though the corporation still utilises purple in its branding, we are unsure if using a Yahoo service like Finance or Weather indicates an unexpected love for the colour. When people claim that Yahoo is not as good as the sum of its parts, Lanzone responds that a Yahoo Finance user will become enmeshed in the Yahoo-sphere and utilise other services.
A hint to 2025 conduct supports the endeavour. In an effort to position itself as a platform for viral content, Yahoo has agreements with more than 100 influencers. He claims that, in a way, the business is going back to its original goal of making the internet’s bounty available to as many people as possible. He recently hosted cofounder Jerry Yang in an all-hands, suggesting a revived legacy and a symbolic reunion.
“What attracted people to Yahoo as a portal? For what reason did they adore it? What made it so beneficial to them?” he enquires.
You can truly meet the users’ everyday needs, which begin with the news and weather as soon as they wake up, followed by their communications tools and other necessities.
The widespread consensus in Silicon Valley is that chatbot agents, not homepages, will soon be able to handle all of those tasks. Using Yahoo’s uptrending data, Lanzone warns, “Not so fast.”
Regarding his endgame, Jim Lanzone is evasive. He claims that “Yahoo is the same as any late-stage pre-IPO company.”
There are only three possible consequences for that: you get acquired, you go public, or you remain private indefinitely. We’re in building mode and don’t have anything to announce. But you can handicap such results without a betting programme.
It doesn’t seem possible to remain private forever. At the time of Apollo’s sale, Reed Rayman, a partner and current Yahoo chair, stated that Lanzone would “steward Yahoo through a transformational stage.”
A short-term initial public offering (IPO) does not appear to be feasible in the current depressed financial climate.
However, if the Trump administration chooses to put off merger oversight, the company might be acquired by one of the giants. Do you recall Microsoft’s 2008 attempt to pay over $50 billion to acquire the faltering business? Keep in mind that Yahoo already manages a large portion of its generative AI and its search index.
Jim Lanzone appears content to continue the turnaround for the time being. About ten years ago, Yahoo and the 49ers struck a long-term agreement that required the displays to display the Yahoo exclamation point and lead the audience in the yodel that has been a staple of TV commercials after each touchdown.
Soon after taking over as CEO, Lanzone was in the stands when Christian McCaffrey scored, to the cheers of 80,000 spectators. Lanzone didn’t believe that they were considering turnarounds and portals.
“It just struck me,” he adds, “that this brand has a lot of latent love.”