Jim Lanzone on Yahoo’s Turnaround and Leading Through a Downturn

Jim Lanzone says he left law school for business school and became a product manager as the internet industry emerged. His first startup raised $50 million and had millions of website users, but the dot-com crash upended its plans and its remaining assets were sold to Ask Jeeves.

At Ask Jeeves he led product during a turnaround and later became CEO after the business was sold. He subsequently founded the internet television guide Clicker, sold it to CBS in 2011, led CBS Interactive, and became Tinder CEO before joining Yahoo in 2021.

The collapse of his first company meant layoffs and a painful experience for the team. Lanzone says helping revive Ask Jeeves after that shaped his attraction to underestimated businesses and to building teams that can surprise competitors.

He acknowledges a continuing desire to prove himself. He enjoys the combination of innovation, growth and a workplace people want to join, recalling how Ask went from layoffs and low regard to attracting staff across the Bay Area.

To define high performance, Lanzone invokes coach John Wooden's distinction between activity and achievement. Leaders need clarity about the result they want, then a strong team capable of producing it rather than simply being busy.

He looks for four qualities when hiring: real expertise, emotional intelligence, ambition to achieve rather than win internal politics, and genuine enthusiasm for the work. He values colleagues who can prioritize, debate constructively, work with others and question their own assumptions.

Lanzone is skeptical of relying on standardized interview questions. He prefers conversations that reveal what a candidate knows and how they operate, across several meetings, followed by discussions with his core team and people who know the candidate.

He says the precise questions vary by person; sometimes he asks about their personal history. In his view company values are expressed mainly through whom an organization hires and what behavior it accepts or challenges.

Looking back on hiring mistakes, Lanzone recalls deferring too much to supposedly seasoned executives with prestigious backgrounds. He says process and credentials are not substitutes for judgment, emotional intelligence and collaborative product work.

Asked about the maxim that any doubt should end a decision, he disagrees with a fixed rule. Product teams need enough self-doubt to keep improving and use evidence, while excessive certainty about doubt can prevent worthwhile risks.

Stebbings asks how Lanzone achieved product speed at Tinder. Lanzone credits the team with creating a video showing a possible future for the product: he did not make or commission it, but supported the work, contributed feedback and helped unblock it.

He says bottlenecks often arise when product leaders cannot bring stakeholders into a decision or lack the judgment to make one. People do not have to get everything they request, but they should understand the reasoning after contributing to the discussion.

For prioritization, Lanzone starts with return on investment, while acknowledging that calculating it is complex. He wants teams to understand the user journey, the features people value and points of monetization before deciding where the product underperforms.

A roadmap should also balance immediate fixes, medium-term opportunities and larger long-term bets. He compares fitting projects and resources together to a game of Tetris; in his consumer-internet context, the desired outcome is sustainable growth.

Stebbings presses him on what growth means: users, retention or revenue. Lanzone says these must move together. In search, more queries support monetization, but excessive advertising can damage the experience, so he favors optimizing revenue and user experience rather than maximizing either alone.

He uses an annual planning process to connect a product roadmap and its investments to intended outcomes. Short- and long-term choices differ by business: at CBS Interactive, he says, stronger revenue from CNET helped fund a longer-term streaming subscription opportunity.

Resource allocation is fundamental for a CEO, but Lanzone rejects the idea that a leader succeeds as a dictator. He sees his role as coordinating a team, alongside his particular strengths in product and building culture.

He recalls difficult periods including the dot-com crash and the aftermath of September 11. At Ask, he says, the valuation had fallen dramatically and the atmosphere was bleak; reaching a stronger position afterward gave him confidence.

At Clicker, Lanzone accepted investment shortly before the 2008 crash and offered to return it. He recalls investors Bill Gurley and Jeff Yang encouraging him to continue, arguing that strong companies could be built through such periods.

His first advice for a downturn is to protect the balance sheet so the company can survive. He also sees potential opportunity for survivors to gain market share or acquire assets, and believes a leader should be a credible source of optimism.

Stebbings asks how deeply founders should cut and warns about repeated layoffs. Lanzone rejects a universal percentage or a rule that only one round is always appropriate: decisions depend on the company and on information available at the time.

He warns against underestimating the duration or severity of a downturn after a long expansion. He cites Airbnb's pandemic response as an example of both protecting the balance sheet and discovering a leaner operating model, while presenting it as a case rather than a formula.

Stebbings challenges whether optimism can erode trust when conditions are bad. Lanzone says it must be grounded in honesty, direct communication and adaptation to the actual situation; a trusted management team matters more than a single leader's assurances.

The same flexibility applies to the business model and valuation expectations. He recalls companies seeking acquisition prices he considered inflated and argues that founders may need to revise expectations when market conditions change.

On board communication, Lanzone argues the work begins with choosing investors who can support and challenge a founder. He cautions against selecting a board solely by firm reputation or the highest valuation and values an independent director with entrepreneurial experience.

He wants directors to recognize the same underlying reality so discussions can focus on strategy rather than repeatedly debating whether the crisis exists. He describes the latter dynamic as exhausting based on his own experience.

Lanzone says a turnaround needs useful foundations: meaningful traffic, a recognizable brand, products with loyal users and an organization that can be improved. Good people and a better roadmap can then build on those existing assets.

Stebbings asks whether familiarity is enough when a brand no longer seems attractive. Lanzone distinguishes Ask Jeeves, which he says remained difficult to rehabilitate as a brand, from Yahoo, whose established audience and individual products he considers valuable.

In 2022 Lanzone says Yahoo has about 900 million monthly users and cites strong positions in mail, finance, sports and news. These are the CEO's contemporary company claims; the interview does not establish independent market-share definitions or verification.

He argues Yahoo had not been central to Verizon's priorities and recalls a sports business plan tied to 5G adoption rather than product leadership. He also describes Yahoo as generating billions in revenue and being highly profitable, without providing audited figures in the interview.

Lanzone would keep the Yahoo name. He says Apollo restored it when its acquisition closed in 2021 and argues that ordinary users have more affection for the brand than some people in Silicon Valley; his proposed first steps are to improve the organization and products.

He presents Apollo's investment thesis as taking multiple chances across existing and new products, with cash-generating assets supporting investment and potential acquisitions. He claims the deal has returned capital unusually quickly for Apollo, but does not give a return calculation or independently verifiable details.

Lanzone argues that Apollo intends to grow the business rather than simply sell it for parts. That is the assessment of Yahoo's CEO, whose role is aligned with its owner; his optimism about future acquisitions and results is a plan, not an established outcome.

He says he reorganized Yahoo by putting general managers in charge of sports, finance, mail, search and other verticals, with responsibility for their own businesses. His goal was to give teams clear ownership and encourage product innovation in each area.

Lanzone expects roughly 10 to 12 direct reports in his role, with some senior general managers eventually overseeing groups of businesses. At CBS Interactive, he says, 25 direct reports proved too many for him to manage effectively.

He describes the resulting model as federal and state: business leaders run their own operations and plans, while the center provides shared services and support. The CEO hires and manages those leaders and works with them on their plans.

How long to give someone who is underperforming depends on the role. Lanzone says senior hires generally deserve more time and a fair chance to respond, though he sets no fixed deadline and recognizes that a persistently poor fit is difficult for both sides.

Asked about weaknesses, he says his background did not start in engineering and finance is not his strongest discipline. He relies on strong chief financial officers and believes leaders should understand where their own skills end and the team must complement them.

Experience has made hiring, organizational design, planning and recognizing needless process easier for him, as well as increased his confidence in taking risks. He cautions that these lessons come from consumer internet and might not transfer directly to a different industry.

What remains hard is the desire for independence when a CEO is accountable to a board, shareholders and employees. Winning also remains difficult, he says; the attention given to successful companies can hide the many that failed.

For management reading he recommends Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, and for entrepreneurship Phil Knight's Shoe Dog. He values the former's account of leading experts who do not naturally fit together and putting the team before oneself.

At Yahoo, he says, changing people's mindset takes time. A new team cannot simply inherit his past experiences of successful transformations; its members need to live through the work themselves, which requires patience.

Asked which other company he would lead, Lanzone names Twitter as a product he had long admired but says he is committed to Yahoo. Asked about his children, he hopes they will have humor, curiosity for new experiences and joy.

Looking back, he would tell his younger self to join an internet company sooner. He had little business background, went to law school and met his wife there, before ultimately finding his way into technology.

On marriage, Lanzone describes friendship, humor, romance and keeping each other engaged as important in his own relationship. He also makes a claim about Tinder's share of US marriages; the interview provides no source, so it should not be treated as established evidence.

Asked in 2022 where he would like Yahoo to be in 2027, Lanzone says the ideal would be to return to public ownership after improving the company while private. He stresses that conditions are uncertain and that he is working quarter by quarter; this is an aspiration, not a confirmed outcome.

Stebbings thanks Lanzone for the conversation, and they close the interview.