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BREAKING: Inside Palantir with Alex Karp
Exclusive interview in Palantir’s office.
We cover:
- $PLTR record earnings
- ~$500B market cap milestone
- New Biography: The Philosopher in the Valley
- The rise of AIP & its impact on global enterprise
- Morality, value creation, & helping Americans win
- Dyslexia, artistry, & Karp’s leadership philosophy
- The Legacy of Rosita
- Cupcakes
Special thank you to @elianoayounes for the strategic vibes & the @PalantirTech team for helping put this together!
Highlights:
(00:00) Inside Palantir w/ Alex Karp
(02:16) Building w/o hierarchy, the anti-playbook culture
(05:00) Artistry & conviction in product creation
(06:45) Ignoring consensus & betting on vision
(08:45) Helping Americans win - soldiers, workers, investors
(11:00) Moral conviction & the foundation of Palantir
(13:00) Meritocracy, realism, & Western values
(15:41) The Eisenhower Award & moral leadership
(19:45) Dyslexia, intuition, & leading through instinct
(22:38) Value creation vs. hype in the AI boom
(26:19) Launching AIP - Palantir’s turning point
(28:30) AIP as the operating system for the AI era
(33:15) Rosita - family
(39:55) Cupcake
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Sequoia's @shaunmmaguire says SpaceX is still underrated
"@elonmusk is still extremely under-appreciated. He only gets 10% of the appreciation he deserves."
" I first invested in 2019. Cumulatively, I've invested probably $1.2B. Across all the different funds that position's worth ~$12B today."
" It's just the very, very beginning of the company."
Phenomenal progress for @SpaceX...
But these numbers will seem minuscule in short order
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Starlink revenue just grew 69% from a year ago to $5.2B in a single quarter.
SpaceX's 1st employee Tom Mueller (@lrocket) says they always knew Starlink would "hockey stick" their growth:
"All the naysayers said, 'There's no way they'll be profitable. They're going to crash.'"
"We're looking at it the other way saying, 'This will hockey stick the stock.'"
"Which it did."
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch (@rauchg) explains why the future of computing is headless:
“What does headless mean?”
“Headless means that we no longer go to the head ourselves. The agent can go and get the data out of the system and then either create new software or create new visualizations of the data.”
“There was this entire category of SaaS you could call ‘no-code.’ I'm on the opposite of end of the spectrum. I'm a ‘yes-code’ company because I'm now saying coding agents basically make the code free.”
“You buy Vercel as the platform, & then you never have to buy software again because you can just generate it to your needs.”
Ken Griffin breaks down the biggest hedge fund trade of 2026:
Citadel's takeover of Situational Awareness's public-equity portfolio.
Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI-focused hedge fund had a $20B+ disclosed stock portfolio and suffered a 67% decline in July after gaining 439% earlier in 2026.
Citadel stepped in, acquired most of its public-equity portfolio in less than 24 hours, and subsequently reduced over 80% of the acquired risk through nearly 100 block trades totaling $4B+.
Griffin explains how Citadel capitalized on forced deleveraging, why distressed selling can create sharp market reversals, and the risks of excessive leverage.
› "This is like a classic playbook in finance. You think somebody's in trouble and you start to try to anticipate the moves they're gonna need to make ... you actually start to turn a possibility into a crystallized reality."
› "When you acquire a portfolio in that market environment you generally get a pretty sharp reversal in price as confidence is [restored] and the anxiety about a portfolio suffering an unexpected quick divestiture ends."
› "We did the trade in less than 24 hours and managing the risk profile of that portfolio did take us several days of trading in the marketplace."
› "They got caught, I wouldn't say in the perfect storm, but they got caught in 3 mid-size storms. And clearly, they must have had too much leverage in the portfolio at peak."
› "Citadel was in a tough spot in 2008, height of the financial crisis. You know, if Morgan Stanley had not achieved their funding with the Japanese and had failed, I don't think I'd be on stage today."
› "Like every firm in financial services, if you survive long enough, part of your history will be a moment in time of despair. If you survive long enough, every levered financial institution will have a footnote in their history of when their back was against the wall."
Ken Griffin of Citadel questions the economics of the AI infrastructure boom:
›What happens when GPU supply exceeds demand & pricing goes into free fall?
›Are today's semiconductor margins sustainable? Are investors overestimating the useful life of GPUs?
“Look, I think this market is actually experiencing people doing research.
For the couple of years, if you were on the thematic program of we're gonna spend hundreds of billions or a trillion dollars in data centers, we're gonna build compute at a scale never seen before, which companies in that story are choke points in supply chains that will have abnormally high margins? And who will be the big winners in this transformation?
Will it be the Microsofts & AWSs who will be the gatekeepers to the foundational models? Like, who's going to earn the economic rents?
But in some sense, like, 'I'm just gonna buy them all. I'm gonna buy the hyperscalers, I'm gonna buy the chip, I'm gonna buy businesses that make things I've never even heard of 5 years ago in Korea and Taiwan & in Japan.'
And now we're reaching a point where people are becoming more discerning.
We do realize that we are seeing extremely high margins in DRAM & MLCCs in areas where there are real supply constraints, but people are now starting to look out 2 years, 3 years. How long is this going to last?
And in particular, I don't wanna be doom & gloom, but GPUs, like airlines, have a very low marginal cost to run.
The incremental seat on an airline that's not full, if you can sell that ticket for $20, you're making money in that seat.
And that's one of the reasons that the airline industry is such a nightmare, is because the moment you have overcapacity, pricing goes into free fall.
We saw this actually with the telecom build-out back in 2000. We built more fiber than we had demand for, & the price of telecommunications just went straight down.
If we reach a point where the provisioning of GPUs exceeds demand for GPUs, marginal pricing will actually go into free fall.
And that really upends all the investment assumptions that people are working with today.
That's issue number one.
And issue number 2 is:
I think people are taking a step back & saying, 'What is the useful life of a GPU?'
Right here, right now, there's people that are earning extraordinary pricing on GPUs that are 5 or 6 years old.
And so there's a growing set of concerns that I can't give the same capitalization rate or the same revenue models to year 7, 8, 9 of a chip in the future that maybe I was using 12 months ago.
So I think we're really grappling with just how far will this demand carry us in the marketplace.”
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on AI companies scraping all of Yahoo's content without permission:
“You will see the Yahoo brand show up all the time in citations there.”
“We are a top 20 publisher whose content has been taken by the large language models without permission.”
He says Yahoo built its new AI answer engine Yahoo Scout to excels at content that's real time so they aren’t as susceptible to the evergreen content that LLMs “photocopied and took with them.”
Molly O’Shea retweeted
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
Why does Gen Z love Yahoo but hate AI companies?
Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) says it comes down to one thing: trust
"Every one of these new agent products, the first thing they ask is, 'Can we have access to your email & calendar?'"
"I think [that] gives us a place to play in that space.. But we also have trust. We already have them utilizing us for those things."
"But it's ours to lose. I mean, trust is something that's yours to lose. I think new brands will always have to find that out."
TIL: Gen Z loves Yahoo ?!?
“Over 50% of our audience is Gen Z & Millennial. 75% of Gen Z is using Yahoo or one of our products.”
Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) reveals how Yahoo’s legacy brand was able to capture the Gen Z audience:
“College Fantasy Football, we kinda broke the internet when we announced it this summer, and it has been amazing.. We had our 3 biggest days ever this year for NFL, but College—40% of those users are brand-new to Yahoo.”
“We have seen a 31% absolute point lift in brand love with Gen Z. That’s from our Cardi B campaign, from our Kyle Cooke, the Weatherboy campaign, from Summer House.”
“It has been incredible to see that Yahoo has a lot of latent brand love in there for it, & especially with younger audiences.”
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
Why Yahoo just stole @dee_bosa from CNBC to create a new show covering AI and tech:
CEO Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) says Yahoo is deliberately moving away from the breaking news model
“We wanted to do content to provide & help our users make better decisions to accomplish their goals.”
“We have amazing business analysts for analyzing the stock market. We just signed Deirdre Bosa from CNBC who’s coming over to join @BrianSozzi.”
Yahoo Finance and journalist @dee_bosa are launching a new show covering AI, tech, and how they are reshaping global markets.
Her show will stream on weekdays from a new studio in San Francisco and will launch this fall. Stay tuned for additional details in the coming weeks!
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Jim Lanzone reveals what it was really like as CEO of Tinder: "almost 10% of all marriages in the US were started on Tinder"
"Almost 50% of all marriages were started online 50% of all marriages were started online, and Tinder was 25% of online."
"It was always perceived by others to be like a hookup app or whatever, but that is not how the team internally viewed it."
"I loved the fact that Tinder from the outside was viewed one way, but if you were on the inside, you've never met a team of people more passionate about the mission of helping people find their person."
"And I never would have left, it's the only time I've ever left a job. Everywhere else I stayed for a long time."
Molly O’Shea retweeted
.@jlanzone and his team are a force and a big part of why I wanted to partner with Yahoo Finance. Have seen firsthand how fast they move & how much ambition there is for what's next
we're making a bet on AI & on an enormous audience trying to make sense of how its changing business and markets and society
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Thank you @MollySOShea! That was a fun one.
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
Molly O’Shea retweeted
Jim Lanzone’s biggest lessons from a career turning around legacy companies:
› 50x’d Ask Jeeves
› Took CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users
› Now leading Yahoo’s turnaround
“The first was Ask Jeeves, which is kind of the poster child for the Web 1.0 crash.”
“I joined there as one of the heads of product & over time worked my way up to CEO. We 50x'd that stock & sold it to IAC & Barry Diller.”
“I then left to do another startup that was bought by CBS. I joined as the CEO of their internet group, which had bought multiple public companies over time that were not performing at their best.”
“That was turnaround #2... We went from 70 to 220 million users with those properties.”
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?