- In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Yahoo’s Jim Lanzone.
- The big story: Tariff-driven inflation is here and there is more to come.
- The markets: Moderate global selloff.
- Analyst notes from Pantheon Macroeconomics, EY-Parthenon, and Oxford Economics on inflation.
- Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Yahoo is an advertising business, a search engine, an email provider, a media company, an aggregator, a cautionary tale—turning down a chance to acquire Google, twice!—a comeback kid and more. And CEO Jim Lanzone is almost as ubiquitous these days as the 30-year-old brand he was hired to revive almost four years ago.
Maybe that’s because he now has something to talk about. While the Apollo-owned company doesn’t disclose revenue numbers, it’s trending up on metrics like monthly users, search traffic, and user engagement. In this week’s Leadership Next podcast, Kristin Stoller and I chatted with Lanzone about what’s next.
A leader credited with boosting brands like Tinder, CBS Interactive, Clicker Media and Ask.com, he also talks about the myth of overnight success. “The book that I go back to is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. If anyone wants to think that Nike happened overnight or they were just brand geniuses—it took years of building that company.”
He takes inspiration from the revival of another shoe brand—New Balance—in plotting where Yahoo can go. “There’s no reason, if our products are great, that we couldn’t do the same thing,” says Lanzone. “I hope we can get the brand back on the map in a way where we reward that kind of latent love that I think that always has been out there across generations. Maybe it’s a bit of a modern, vintage brand if you are younger.”
A trip to see the San Francisco 49ers game in Levi’s Stadium gave him hope early on. “Every time the Niners scored a touchdown, up on the screen it turned into a Yahoo Sports highlight and all 80,000 people screamed Yahoo at the top of their lungs in a yodel. That’s when I knew there was something to work with here.” Click here to listen on Spotify or Apple.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
