Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on turning around a 30-year-old internet brand and launching AI search product Scout

He's the CEO of Yahoo.

And he's live in the TVP Ultradome. [music] We had breakfast with him earlier today. Had a great chat. We're very excited to have you live in the studio. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. You guys got me, you know, where a reason the green blazer.

You said it's hard to get you in a

any blazer, but the green one even. you know, we're going to be following up after the show.

That's fantastic. Anyway, uh in introduce yourself since this is your first time on the show. Let everyone know who you are, what you do.

Uh Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo, which uh been doing now a little bit over four years. Everybody knows Yahoo is the 30-year-old, you know, original guide to the internet, but we are the turnaround team who've been kind of putting it back on the map.

Yeah. I want to get into the turnaround, but first, let's uh let's back up and start with a little bit of your career. What led you to CEO of Yahoo? Um I don't know how it happened but I kind of became the turnaround guy.

I had a startup in the 90s. Yeah.

Consumer startup. We wound up selling that to Ask

Jeieves.

Uh I joined there as the head of product and became CEO. That was the first turnaround uh in search. I did my first

10 or 12 years in search. We sold that to IA and I worked for Barry Diller then there for a few years.

Oh no.

Left to do a startup again that uh the investors were Bill Gurley from Benchmark, Jeff Yang at at Redpoint. Uh, and we wound up selling that was a video search engine for like the original, you know, first few years of of TV and video on the internet. We sold that to uh to CBS where I joined as the head of digital.

Yeah.

And that wound up turning into a 8-year adventure. We we founded what what uh was called CBS All Access at the time. It's now called Paramount Plus. That was our baby.

No way.

Uh, yep. I'm user number one in the logs for that thing.

We wound up eventually having our own show, Star Trek. We brought that back. Um, that was really fun time period.

Okay. Or do you still get a free account? You get to watch UFC for free now.

Um, I don't know if they're still tracking. [laughter] Don't hope they're not listening. Uh, but I finally

get him to pay.

I finally lost my 20-year comp to Wall Street Journal.

Uh, I just logged on one day and it was gone. So, I don't want the Paramount guys to hear. I won't be able to watch

20 20 year comp.

Watch Land Man. Uh but yeah uh my um kind of COVID hallucination was uh I became the CEO of Tinder for

Oh yeah.

for about a year and then left to to take the Yahoo job.

Yeah. And was that through IA as well? Okay.

Yeah. Jo and Joey was uh sure

who was the CEO of IC was the chairman at at match.

How much had you interacted with Yahoo throughout your career

like on on more of the business side obviously as a

ton. I' I've known every executive team, competed against them at almost every company. Um, so back, you know, for me the the heart of it was like the Jeff Weiner, Brad Garlinghouse, uh, you know, kind of era in the 2000s. Um, and then at CBS Interactive, we were competing with them in every single vertical. So that that new team that came in, uh, pre-sale to Verizon, you know, I knew them very well, too, and definitely competed head-to-head in in most categories.

Yeah. What was the uh what was the inciting element for the Ask Jeieves turnaround? Like when does a company decide and what what are the key moments to be like okay we're doing a turnaround now?

I believe I was announced as becoming the head of product on September 11th.

Wow.

So that was kind of rolled into it being a turnaround. The stock had gotten down to I think 79 cents a share.

I think it was pretty close to being delisted. We got a new CEO um of the company who who brought me in. And um and and look, what I've learned about all turnarounds in consumer internet, which is kind of all I'm qualified to talk about and all all I've done, uh is you have to be able to start with a lot of traffic.

And if you have that and products that have seen better days, a brand that's seen better days, and a you know, a team or organization that needs to uh be turned around, you can work with that, right? Um the hardest thing to get on the consumer internet is actual traffic.

Sure. And some of these things like Ask Jeieves at the time, you know, we really were the only major search engine to survive the Google era. Yeah.

From all the ones that were originally there like Excite and Looks Smart and LOS and all those, you know, we made it through and and the formula was way better product

uh reduce down the number of things you're doing, get a way better team,

uh and and have at it. And we we totally grew every year. We also were the first to switch to Google Adwords at the time.

So, I've been partners with Google at every company, too, going back to 2002. that that was and you could see it as we were testing it

that switching from overure to Google was going to make us profitable.

Wow.

And you know, you see it in the in the logs and uh and so we made that switch and we were off.

Interesting. Uh what what what do you think about uh the importance of traffic, the importance of users relative to the importance of of ARR or revenue that might not be sticky? like we see a lot of startups that uh they grow very quickly, they ramp, and then there's a question of like churn. Are people going to keep paying? And I'm wondering if uh if there's if you see something where there's potential like over rotation to oh wow, the ARR numbers are really good, but there there's not actually that big of a community. So this doesn't have the staying power of something that just is like installed broadly amongst humanity. I mean we see it at every I look with enterprise it's a little different find a way to goose your metrics and get there. Yeah.

So that's the right question on consumer

going to the beginning of time to the first internet boom when when it crashed. You know there were so many companies that probably were even good ideas but but didn't really have real traffic. They were buying ads and all that. That's always been the case.

Also there just wasn't enough users on the internet to sustain maybe maybe businesses at at that time.

Well things just kind of got out of hand. [laughter] Yeah,

in a lot of ways at that time, but um but you know, even through the the 2010s and everything else, you've always seen companies just get

it's almost like the roundtpping that's happening now

where you would get funded and you just buy a jackload of traffic and and [laughter] that's different than having truly sustainable traffic. And Yahoo, even

30 years in, 75% of our traffic today is is direct, right? We still have SEO. We still do performance marketing and and brand marketing, but the the vast majority of our users are direct. Vast majority of our ad impressions are to people who are, you know, logged in.

So, yeah, there is a difference.

Talk about what was going on with Yahoo like prior to when you were brought in, when you were brought in, why you took the job. Obviously, if you're a turnaround guy, you're not going to like you're going to take the job where you think you can actually have an impact and be successful. Uh but uh walk us through kind of that moment.

Yeah, this was the white whale for me. Like I knew I I think I'm on record in like 2010 saying this would be the turnaround I want to get my hands on.

Um [laughter]

let me let me get my hands.

I have a lot of empathy for what those teams went through because Yahoo had probably the worst business mistake in the history of the internet in 2000 uh when they they gave search to Google. The the history gets written as as they lost search to Google but they never did search. They first outsourced to Alta Vista, then to Inktomy, and then in June of 2000, uh, after the crash, to save money and get a better deal, they outsourced it to Google, which was almost more enterprise at the time. Yeah.

And to get a better price, they gave Google a link with the Google logo on every search results page. [laughter] And so, I think Larry and Sergey just sat there watching the traffic migrate over. But it was done for the right reasons. They were the guide to the internet. They were they were a portal. And they were there. There was no business model in search for another two years.

They let the fox in the hen house

and they well two more years to to and they were public. So they they they made the right call giving uh their users the best search engine,

but it cost them owning. So I think I think the brand has taken some lumps over the years for like making some vast mistake. But truly at the time it was kind of the right call. In the 2000s they they tried to make up for that. They tried to get into social and video and and and they built a big thing down here and did a lot of entertainment.

Uh so you know just and they were public so it was really hard all the way until they sold to Verizon in 201617

uh you know to be a standalone public company in the in the face of all that. So then you then you get four or five years inside of Verizon which is a telecom company and and they had bought it with some vision of

of some data play. Um but then that CEO left and a new CEO came in who who wasn't really responsible for that deal.

What are we doing here?

And so it was just hard I think to to kind of get real strategic alignment around uh what always should have been the mission which was the original mission to be the guide to the internet. And if and through all of that,

Yahoo is still number one or number two in all these important categories like finance and sports and news, email, and even number three in search. and and where they were still strong had been where they had never kind of stopped following the original mission. So that we kind of just tried to move it back to that.

Yeah. What uh I I want to know more about the acquisitions that happened before the surface area of the company? I know that there were a lot of digital ad acquisitions, but did the previous team uh buy a lot of stuff in in social and video and and make a lot of different bets or was there were there a lot of uh building internally that was happening around new products that are maybe less of a focus now?

I think especially in Jeff's era, they were doing a lot of very interesting product development. Okay.

Um and then also in obviously in Marissa's era, she's a product person and they did that too. They also missed on a few companies, right? Google and Facebook and you know I think the price just got out out of hand for who they were at the time.

Uh and then both companies cuz we got spun out not just with Yahoo. It was called Yahoo but we also at AOL which have been bought

by Verizon. So those two companies combined have bought maybe 40 adtech companies or things in that space um along with a lot of other things like Flickr over the years and and Tumblr

um that you know all of which wind up being devested over time. We came in we devested a lot more of them

uh and just tried to get the focus of the company down to where we thought we could win

which are the core consumer products and then in the adtech space we kept the DSP the demand side platform um because it turns out that one of the biggest strengths of Yahoo is the data.

Mh. Uh, not very many companies have this first-party relationship with hundreds of millions of of users. Some companies do, but but not a lot. Yeah.

And one thing you can do with that is build things for your own properties, but another is that you can use that to help target off of Yahoo. Um, and so that's why our DSP has been growing as well.

Yeah. What uh uh at that initial spin out like how integrated was AOL and were AOL and Yahoo or is it like same offices even?

It's um

because they split now

but how how how

the headquarters for AOL was still in Washington DC.

Okay.

But our office in New York City is their old office which is where Tim Armstrong's office was when he was running the company.

Okay.

Um so we still have a good contingent there. Sure.

Um but the company was just kind of in a lot of different places. offices here. They're just kind of all over.

Now AOL is in Italy.

America Online. [laughter] America Online is in Italy. Italy.

True. And we're still working arm- arm with them because we were pretty tied together. It was called Verizon Media. And um so we're having to unwind a bunch a bunch of that.

So what's the core uh what's the core of the business today? uh and like as you go down the long tail, there are other products, finance, sports, etc. that that are still driving growth and you're continuing to invest in uh and then there's stuff that you're not doing, but what what's the surface area of Yahoo?

Um I'd say that look, the biggest businesses are search and mail.

And I call mail the spine of the book for what kind of brings the most users back every day.

Uh but we get there, we get to our size. We're usually top, we are top five every month. We had 250 million users in the US, 700 million globally. But it's not true.

We get the the gong. [laughter]

That was not a gong.

Watch out.

We got We got a new

We got a new

Oh, look at that. [laughter]

We're hitting it for a top five. Well, I'll tell you the the uh the chos I brought along is a very small gong alternative [laughter] at the right moment.

What's this?

Um I got to open it up.

That is the Yahoo.

Yodo [laughter] button. So you smack that. It's such an iconic sound

which just still happens at n

after touchdown at n 49er games that happens the whole crowd.

It kind of let me know that the brand had a chance to to come back cuz the whole crowd

we added we added the purple here for you too.

Thank you. That's good.

We'll add this to the board. I'll keep it here for

Yeah. So I think everybody our user base gets there in every different way. So some people we are their fancy platform and have been for many years. Uh they love Yahoo Sports and we have the number one NBA podcast. We have the number one combat sports podcast.

Which one is that? Uh Ariel Hwani Uncrowned.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Uh we have Ross Dinger just won sports writer of the year. So we have a lot of like ways in.

Does that mean you have a you have a marketing partnership with them where they're advertising Yahoo or you're doing distribution of their show?

They're signed with us and Ariel's uh studio is in Got is in our offices in New York and KC does it you know off campus most of the time but uh

Yahoo Finance the number one way that people you know for them to uh to increase their wealth or or you know save money um but mostly you know a lot of uh tracking the market um

and we do we also do in those businesses we're now doing 60 hours of programming a week

for sports and almost that for finance but we're not we're basically just providing analysis and context for everything that's happening. out there scooping like that. That's for shams at ESPN for well not for us.

Talk about the other things that are downstream of of finance and uh and sports. You can imagine you you're doing fantasy sports then you do daily fantasy then you do sports betting or you do uh finance and then you have an investment platform and then you have a crypto exchange and and a coin. Like what what's on the table? What's off the table?

Sports betting is a sad one because seven years ago Verizon did a deal with Bet MGM. Okay,

that was exclusive. So, we've had to be on the sidelines this entire time. That finally ends at the end of this quarter.

So, we are out there playing the field. We did a short-term deal with Poly Market. Yeah.

Uh to hit markets where Bit MGM isn't, but we're we're now moving strongly back into that. Okay.

Um but yeah, smaller ones are I mean, it's not small. News is is one of our biggest sites and and is uh and and our app where we bought Artifact. If you guys remember Artifact, we bought that.

Wait, from Kevin Sis?

Oh, and Kevin and Mike. Yeah. No way. We bought it about 18 months ago. love that Yahoo News app.

Oh, that's a great It was so close because I believe it was like preGPT4 when he when they when they launched that and you could see a glimmer of like where that was going and it wasn't quite dialed and I feel like now it's like Yeah. Especially when you power with more data. It's all licensed and stuff.

That's right. And it was better than what we were doing. I mean, we just admitted it and a lot of times you'll a company like us will buy it and then kind of force them into the Borg. Yep.

We actually made the Yahoo News app their app.

Sure. and just changed the logos and took their algorithms into helping us with the Yahoo homepage, which is big a big news feed. Um, but even things like weather, which we've historically been top five and used to power the Apple

uh product, um, is still huge. We we have a new GM for that. I used to work at Twitter who who's been rebuilding that. And I should say every every version of our products has been relaunched over the past 18 months.

Uh, we brought in an awesome team, awesome product people,

shipping. Uh we are shipping all the time and uh the exception until this week was search.

Yeah.

Which is our biggest business but we had not we had outsourced just to Bing for the since 2009.

Um but this week we we launched our our new entry into that space.

Interesting. And what was that process like? Did you hire engineering team for that or were there business considerations?

Yeah. So we um about a year ago we looked at AI search as something brand new.

Yeah. and something our users obviously needed, but our our our relationship with Bing had always been indexed, you know, web search.

Um, and so we we really got in our minds that we had all these assets to bring to the table. We had

uh we had the traffic, we the way to distribute it, but also we just have all this proprietary data. We have we see 18 trillion user events per year

uh at Yahoo. We have over 500 million user profiles. We have a billion entities that we track. So we we have all these and then all the all the vertical data from all the all of our vertical you're seeing valuations from from companies like Perplexity which have you know tiny tiny fraction of the of the user base and thinking hey maybe there's an opportunity here.

Yeah. [laughter]

Well that that is definitely one part of it. I won't put the words.

Another is is is really thought that we had the ability to bring a differentiated product to that market. Yeah.

We're not going to be an LLM ourselves. We're not going to build that. But if you take our data, you marry it with uh an LLM and we're partnered with Claude on on that and with Bing on grounding, then you could have a really unique product. So that's what launched on Tuesday. That's called Yahoo Scout. Yep.

Um but to your question to bringing that in, we actually uh over last summer, we bought a company called Symbol,

which was run by Eric Fang, who's a very well-known product and CTO in the valley. Yeah.

Um he had a company that that he he sold to us and came in. We put him in charge of all of Search. Yeah. So his team set about building Yahoo Scout.

Uh and we're, you know, so that was the beta launch on on Tuesday.

And what's the Yeah. Yeah. Talk about beta launch. The decision to roll it out to parts of the user base incrementally, hide it behind a fold or a button. Google's been pretty aggressive about just throwing AI search overviews right in the search results for it feels like 100% of their user base pretty quickly. How do you think about not jarring the user base but actually shifting the behavior in a way that's not disruptive?

Um well I think part of that is how we designed the product which is it's an AI answer engine. It is way more similar to search than a pure chatbot and how we've uh how we've launched it. It's available to everybody. So at either scout.com or scout.yahoo.com it's available to everybody in the US.

So it is in beta more as a hedge to say this is just our starting point. we have a lot more work to do here and our roadmap is is very aggressive but um but the way that we've thought about it is being you know given that we have people you know millions of people using search every month it's way more congruent with web search um it is conversational the way an AI an AI search engine would be and a chatbot would be but um but a little more straightforward it's not kind of getting to your inner feelings and having that kind of a conversation it is conversational um but the format is besides being very Yahoo uh with friendly personality, which I think is very different.

It is. [laughter] There you go.

That's what that was for. It is uh it it is all is very visual in how we lay things out and I'd say just very different that way. Um it is also um you know really dipping into all of our unique data to bring in just very original answers. The other thing that we've done besides make it similar to search in a UI perspective is one of our core values of this product was taking care of the open web.

Yeah.

All the answers in AI search come from the open web. The first generation I think were very um research almost based. They look like they were built by research labs. They have citations that didn't send traffic back to where they got that information. What you'll see in Scout is blue highlights all through the text which are all links back to the original sources of information.

Um, so we really want to do our part to uh send traffic downstream and and and maybe set the pace for the way other people should think about it. And then downstream from that will be we we actually think search advertising does not need to be abandoned in this new AI search era.

That there's a way to kind of bring those marketplaces along if you do the interface differently. Um, and so we actually want to get to that as well.

Yeah, we were talking to Matthew Prince of Cloudflare about how much more of the open web that Google sees because no one wants to block the Google bot, but they maybe are saying, "Ah, I'll update my robots txt to not include open AI." Um, do you have an advantage because no one is blocking Yahoo and then you can surface those in AI search results?

Well, we're not crawling. So, we do that with with Bing.

With Bing. Okay. But people aren't blocking that either,

right? Ours ours is with our own, you know, again, we have had thousands of relationships with with content creators, years of our own. So, we have a lot of other data that comes in that way. I I would say that the um

the the AI universe has has um

has not really respected our content that way over [laughter] time. You'll see a lot of Yahoo links on on a on a lot of them. Yeah.

Um but um but we think that the way the best way we fight that is with making a badass product on our own

focusing on yourself. I mean it's it's you know certainly been a number of companies that have just said like we're going to dedicate a huge amount of resources and energy into fighting this and you guys have basically said we're just going to make great products.

I think I think that's the right approach. I mean I think it's very hard to block anyway. Um and um uh so uh so we yeah I mean I I think that generally speaking the way that these products were initially created

clearly did publishers no favors and and I think the stat is that only 20% of publishers believe they can make a sufficient living by or a substantial amount of revenue by licensing their content to AI providers. Yeah.

So there's they're we have to take care of their businesses if we can. And again, we might not get this right with this this first generation. Um, but it's one of the things that we are dedicated to figuring out.

What's the user base like these days?

Yeah, it's we touch 90% of the internet in the US. So, it's um and again and the average user uses two or more of our properties per month [laughter]

because I'm not I'm not trying to get yodals here.

You're bait You're baiting. You're baiting.

I'm not yodal baiting. [laughter]

Yahoo.

Um, there we go. We're going to be we're regret getting that seat. your your viewers will regret it again. [laughter]

Uh um yeah, so the the the user base really cuts across demographics. It's not, you know, your uncle using Yahoo mail. We're the second largest personal email. We don't compete in enterprise mail. We we only compete in personal. Um but we're the only major other platform and it's all new, so people tend to really like it. Um but half of our user base is actually millennial and Gen Z and I think that probably surprises some people.

Yeah, for sure. uh what uh what's the top of funnel look like? What's the user journey to get a Gen Z user uh on a Yahoo mail account?

Um well, I'd say it starts with whatever property they prefer. So that it may be finance or sports, it may be news, it may be, you know, one of our other properties. Um we also I would say we have not put a ton towards brand.

We even did we did our first Super Bowl ad last year in 23 years. It was with Bill Murray.

23 years.

Yeah. but it was only 15 seconds long and we only bought it locally. So, we were being like super

cheap about it. Um, and then it led you to this online exchange with Bill Murray where he emailed you back and forth and sent you other videos and

um but we've we don't have the biggest budget yet. Um, and we are owned by private equity so we're not,

you know, we're not overdoing it on on that and I and margins do matter. Um, but we have a really kick-ass um social media team. We and we do do online ads. We we actually launched a there's a thing called Yahoo games which people similar to like

New York Times or LinkedIn they have G you know Reddit they all have games we have games we launched one with

blackjack

Candy Crush. Yes, we do.

Yes,

we do. We launched one with Candy Crush yesterday

called Crushable and the ad is hilarious. It's on YouTube and it has uh Frankie from um you know Malcolm the Middle. You guys even remember Malcolm?

I do remember Malcolm the Middle. Do you? Uh

he's not much of a TV show, but [laughter]

he knows. He knows I wouldn't know. Yeah. So we we um we've been tried we try to be very creative and a little looser with the brand than you would expect.

Is there an unexpected intergenerational element where if a parent is using Yahoo product?

We're a Yahoo family.

Yeah. I mean it sounds ridiculous but no exist.

Do the Do the children revol win every Zoomer?

Well so so here's the thing. So, I I think that there's a campaign uh not you you know, there's nothing I love more than than advertising and marketing and like I I think there's a campaign that you could run to get not just you know half your you know basically like a bunch of Gen Z millennials are using Yahoo mail and all that stuff, but I think with the right influencer campaign, I look at what uh what JPM has done with the the Sapphire Reserve card specifically making making Yahoo like the the Haley the backbone of Haley Bieber's life, stuff like that. I think you're just like one or two great great campaigns away from it being like uh you can you you have the you know I've run on Gmail, you know, my uh basically my entire life,

but I think there's a possibility to always turn like the next generation hard over to just going back to the to the glory of Yahoo.

Well, we'll know we hit it if Tyler starts using it. Yeah, that's going to be the threshold. But um we have done we have done some of that. We uh we we launched a new fantasy game with Mr. Beast.

We launched another new fantasy game with Liquid Death and and we did an ad with them which is also hilarious which where a guy gets his head cut off at a bar for guillotine leagues.

Sure.

And uh that one at Cleo actually. [laughter]

They really did. We wrote their coattails on it. But um we're humble about the fact that like you know we're coming from behind with this thing. It's a it's a vintage brand that we we do need to earn people's love for the thing. Vintage never the technology is not the brand certainly is.

Yeah. Yeah. But like just in as in terms of the consumer tech products, most people don't think of like vintage.

Yeah. We talked uh with Alexis about this and and um

sorry I'm blanking who Alexis think they did. They did. Yeah, they're out in beta.

And so I think there's something about like nostalgic brands and technology that hasn't been fully explored.

Yeah.

Um we Yeah, we love to tap into that. So maybe we do have a marketing, you know, position open. I know you guys are busy, but

No, John, I started after breakfast brainstorming and uh unfortunately the show is is way too I will keep I'll keep texting you ideas.

Okay, good. And yodelling.

Yeah, yod [laughter] yodelling on the show. uh are you seeing what what are you actually seeing in terms of uh AI and productivity? We've seen a lot of, you know, the MIT research reports, a lot of enterprises did demos, uh, dropped them. At the same time, it feels like the tech is very real. You're not asleep at the wheel. You're partnering with Anthropic on stuff like have you deployed AI tools, vibe coding. Are you seeing actual needle moving cost reductions or performance increases? Anything you can tell us about what you're seeing from operating in your seat? Um, I'd say yes. And and I am also sensitive to the, hey, the CEO says we have to get start using AI and everybody rolls their eyes about it. Um, you know, the way we operate, we've left that to the heads of state. Um, but I would, you know, our CTO has certainly deployed it. HR has done it. Um, all of our heads of engineering who are dedicated to their their brands. So there there's a a head of engineering for each one of those those products. I you know look I I'd say there are certain people I think it's um it's pretty topheavy right there are certain people who uh use it a lot and there are certain people who are just really reluctant to come along for the ride but I think over time

you know of course I would love to see more not not to be more efficient in terms of like saving headcount but in terms of being able to get more done with people that we have

I'm just thinking about like there's there's probably a ton of different like small code changes that happen to the to the Yahoo fantasy code base in a week and if that can just accelerate like that's an improvement, right?

Yeah. Well, it's it's pretty funny though. You would probably be a little surprised how probably would not be that surprised how ancient some of the code bases were that we picked up.

Yeah, of course. Of course.

And uh probably a little harder in some

perfectly suited for AI agents to go through and and do replatforming or cleanup or just add documentation. Like there's a million different ways. But at the same time like you're an enterprise it's going to have cost to that and you have to weigh that against the benefit problem.

We were not even moved to the cloud when we took over. We're in the middle of cloud migrations in every division that we have. [laughter]

I'm not kidding. So

well

there's a lot the problem. You're going to move to the cloud and then everyone's going to be on Mac minis in the future. We have to move back to onrem.

This has been Mac Mini week. There need to be a Mac mini yodel button.

It has. It has. uh what uh why like why why do you turnarounds? Because I and I I have I have a bunch of reasons that that that it makes sense. Uh but in our in our industry, so many people are obsessed with newness, starting the next the next big thing versus working on it, start fresh.

Uh what are what are kind of like the unexpected like joys or or or what's like especially motivating about it? Yeah.

Well, there's a pattern to it where if you do the turnaround, I always tell my team, you can't we can't be brats about it and skip levels of the video game and just,

you know, come out with our own invention like the iPhone or ChatgBT from scratch. We have a job to do of turning the company around. But if you if you do that level by level,

you then earn the right to innovate. And we're in that spot here now where we've uh we got the company on really solid business footing. We did all the hard work and starting with Yahoo Scout on Tuesday as one example, but last year relaunching every one of our brands um on the product side, we got to the point where we could we could start innovating and same thing happened with with CBS Interactive and CNET. We it took three years, but once we did that, we launched CBS All Access in October of 2014, 5 years before Disney Plus. Wow.

And HBO Max and some of these things, we were still early. Um, and back at ASK, we really, our team was kind of well known in the industry for being the ones that lead the charge beyond 10 blue links, which is now

what people are saying again, but I tell you that started 20 years ago.

Uh, where we started bringing structured data into the page um, and natural language kind of move beyond those things. And we got really well known for that and and we're growing on the back of it.

So, I don't look for turnarounds. They in both my first two, they bought my startup.

Sure. Um, in this one, Apollo was buying it and they needed a CEO and I was

I was just really uh jumping out of my seat to go do it. So,

and and how do you what's your framework? I I think like just purely from a value creation standpoint, even though turnaround like turnarounds sound like in many ways so much harder than building something from scratch, you're dealing with, you know, these organizations that have been placed for a long time, code bases that you're inheriting from decades ago, dealing with cloud migration versus just starting in the cloud. But purely from a purely from a value creation standpoint, it's actually easier to make a you know multi-billion dollar company to grow a multi-billion dollar company 25% 50% from an EV standpoint than it is to go from zero to you know billions by itself. So is that part of the is that has that always been part of the appeal?

Honestly, we were um in a lot of cases it was about the journey at first and then good things happened. So we w up 50xing the ass stock by the time we sold the very

You got to get on Patrick Shaughnessy show. 50x.

Hit it. Hit [laughter] the gong yourself. Hit the gong yourself.

50x 50x.

There we go.

20y old gong.

Yeah. Oo. Um, and you know, I think at CBS when when I got there, it was after the the um, you know, the global financial crisis, it was down to $3 a share and I think got back to 70.

Um, so if we do this right at Yahoo, um,

you know, look, I I mean, I think we're back to being any preipo company. It would be either IPO or sale. and and um and I think the only way we can control that is by growing the company and growing that starts with growing the user base and our and our products. It's not more complicated than that.

That's an awesome mission. Thank you so much for coming by and sharing with us.

Yeah, come back come back on again soon. I have I have a lot more questions, but

thank you. I'm going to tell everyone about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and mediumsiz businesses. And I'll also tell you about