Apollo bought Yahoo and AOL from Verizon in 2021 for about $5B, nearly half the $9B Verizon spent assembling them. 5 years later, Yahoo has returned Apollo’s capital in one of the fastest returning deals in the firm’s history.

Jim Lanzone has been CEO of Yahoo since September 2021. Yahoo ranks among the top 5 internet companies in the US, reaching roughly 90% of the American online population and 700M users globally each month across Finance, Sports, Mail, News, and Search. Jim previously served as CEO of Tinder, CBS Interactive, where he launched CBS All Access (now Paramount+), and Ask Jeeves, and co-founded eTour. He sits on the board of Snap.

We go inside the Apollo acquisition, a structure of roughly $4.25B in cash, $750M in preferred interests, and a 10% stake retained by Verizon, and how Jim works with Reed Rayman, now Head of the AI Sector at Apollo and still Yahoo’s board chair. Jim walks through reorganizing Yahoo into GM-led brands, shutting down and selling a money-losing ad tech stack, and divesting EdgeCast, TechCrunch, and AOL, which went to Bending Spoons for a reported $1.4B to $1.5B. We also cover Yahoo Scout, the company’s first in-house search engine in 17 years, and why startups with less than one-tenth of 1% of Yahoo’s users carry higher valuations.

“It’s one of the fastest returning deals in the history of Apollo. We are playing with house money now for what the upside could be here.”

We cover:

› Inside Apollo’s ~$5B acquisition and the deal structure

› Working with Apollo’s Reed Rayman on a growth-led turnaround

› Divesting AOL, EdgeCast, TechCrunch, and the ad tech stack

› Yahoo Scout, AI search, and 30 years of search data

› 700M monthly users and Yahoo’s valuation vs AI startups

Jim Lanzone: https://x.com/jlanzone

Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea

Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy

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Apollo’s Yahoo Playbook, 5 Years After the $5B Deal

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Apollo’s Yahoo Playbook, 5 Years After the $5B Deal