Jim Lanzone

Jim Lanzone
Jim Lanzone
Born	James Lanzone 20 1, 1971
Birthplace	California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	CEO of Yahoo Inc.
Employer	Yahoo Inc.
Known for	CEO of Yahoo Inc., CEO of CBS Interactive, CEO of Ask.com, Founder of Clicker.com
Education	Emory University (JD, MBA)
Spouse(s)	Shannon
Children	3

James "Jim" Lanzone (born January 20, 1971) is an American business executive and the chief executive officer of Yahoo Inc., a position he has held since 2021. Over a career spanning more than two decades in the technology and digital media industries, Lanzone has led several prominent internet companies through periods of transformation and growth. He previously served as CEO of Tinder, president and CEO of CBS Interactive, and CEO of Ask.com. He is also the founder of Clicker.com, a search engine and discovery guide for internet video that was acquired by CBS Corporation in 2011. As CEO of Yahoo, Lanzone has overseen a multi-phase effort to revitalize one of the internet's oldest and most recognizable brands, with a focus on integrating artificial intelligence into the company's products and services.

Early Life

James Lanzone was born on January 20, 1971, in California, United States. Details about his childhood and family background beyond his birthplace remain limited in publicly available records. Lanzone grew up in California and would go on to pursue higher education within the state before attending graduate school on the East Coast.

Education

Lanzone attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. He later attended Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, where he obtained both a Juris Doctor (JD) degree and a Master of Business Administration (MBA). This dual graduate education in law and business provided Lanzone with a foundation that would inform his subsequent career in technology leadership, corporate strategy, and digital media.

Career

Ask.com

Lanzone rose to prominence in the technology industry during his tenure at Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves), the internet search engine. He served as the company's chief executive officer during a period in which the search engine market was intensely competitive, dominated by Google but with several companies vying for market share. Under Lanzone's leadership, Ask.com underwent a significant relaunch branded as "Ask 3D," which introduced new features designed to differentiate the service from its competitors.

Technology journalist Walt Mossberg reviewed the relaunched Ask.com favorably, noting that the service went "much further than Google" in certain aspects of its search presentation and functionality. Industry analysis noted that under Lanzone, Ask.com pursued a strategy focused on the quality and presentation of search results rather than attempting to match Google's scale directly.

In a 2007 profile by The New York Times, Lanzone discussed his approach to leadership and competition in the search industry, providing insight into the challenges of running a smaller search engine in an era of Google's growing dominance.

Lanzone eventually departed Ask.com and was succeeded as CEO by Jim Safka. His tenure at Ask.com was later cited in retrospectives on the evolution of the search industry over two decades.

Clicker.com

After leaving Ask.com, Lanzone founded Clicker.com, a search engine and discovery guide designed to help users find and navigate internet video and television content. The service functioned as a kind of "TV Guide for web video," aggregating and organizing the rapidly growing world of online video content into a searchable and browsable platform.

Clicker.com attracted significant investment from notable figures in the technology and venture capital world. The company's backers included Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures, Allen & Company, Qualcomm Ventures, and Blake Krikorian, the founder of Slingbox.

The service launched in beta at TechCrunch50 on September 14, 2009, a prominent technology conference known for showcasing emerging startups. Clicker aimed to solve a growing problem for consumers: as more and more television shows, movies, and original web content became available online across a fragmented landscape of platforms and websites, users needed a centralized tool to find and access this content. The platform indexed video content from sources across the web and presented it in an organized, searchable format.

Lanzone discussed his entrepreneurial vision for Clicker in a detailed interview, explaining the rationale behind creating a guide for the increasingly complex landscape of online video. He also discussed the company and the broader state of internet startups in a Thanksgiving-themed episode of the podcast This Week in Startups.

Clicker.com was acquired by CBS Corporation on March 4, 2011, a deal that would bring Lanzone into the CBS corporate fold and set the stage for his next major leadership role.

CBS Interactive

Following CBS Corporation's acquisition of Clicker.com, Lanzone was appointed president of CBS Interactive in March 2011, succeeding Neil Ashe in the role. CBS Interactive was at the time one of the top 10 internet properties in the United States, operating a portfolio of major websites and digital brands.

Under Lanzone's leadership, CBS Interactive oversaw a diverse and substantial portfolio of digital properties. These included CBS All Access (the streaming service that would later become Paramount+), CNET (a technology news and review site), GameSpot (a video game journalism site), CBS News (the digital extension of the CBS News division), Metacritic (a review aggregation website), CBS Sports (digital sports coverage), 247 Sports and Scout Media (sports fan communities), MaxPreps.com (high school sports), TVGuide.com, and Last.fm (a music discovery platform), among others.

Lanzone later took on an expanded role as the first chief digital officer of CBS Corporation, a position that gave him broader oversight of the company's digital strategy beyond the interactive division. In this capacity, he was responsible for guiding the overall digital transformation of one of America's largest media conglomerates during a period of rapid change in how audiences consumed entertainment and news.

A 2019 Forbes profile highlighted Lanzone's role in leading CBS Interactive during a period that included the launch of original programming on CBS All Access, including the reboot of The Twilight Zone. The profile described his trajectory from Silicon Valley entrepreneur to corporate media executive and the challenges of managing a large portfolio of digital properties within a traditional broadcast media company.

Tinder

After his tenure at CBS, Lanzone was appointed CEO of Tinder, the popular dating application owned by Match Group. In this role, he oversaw one of the world's most widely used mobile applications, which had fundamentally changed the landscape of online dating. His appointment reflected his reputation as a leader capable of managing large-scale consumer internet products and driving strategic transformation at established digital brands.

Yahoo Inc.

Lanzone became CEO of Yahoo Inc. in 2021, following the company's acquisition by Apollo Global Management. Yahoo, one of the original internet companies founded in the 1990s, had undergone a turbulent period in the preceding years, including a series of leadership changes, the sale of its core internet business to Verizon (which operated it as part of Oath, later Verizon Media), and eventually the sale to Apollo.

Upon taking the role, Lanzone embarked on what has been described as a multi-phase turnaround of Yahoo. The effort began with what he has characterized as a ground-up transformation of the company's technology infrastructure, talent, and product offerings. In interviews, Lanzone has discussed the challenge and opportunity of revitalizing a brand with deep recognition and a user base numbering in the hundreds of millions, but which many in the technology industry had come to view as a relic of an earlier internet era.

A central element of Lanzone's strategy at Yahoo has been the integration of artificial intelligence into the company's products. In 2025, Yahoo unveiled Yahoo Scout, an AI-powered answer engine that draws on the company's more than three decades of user data and content to provide AI-driven responses to user queries. The launch of Yahoo Scout represented an effort to position Yahoo as a competitor in the emerging field of AI-powered search, alongside newer entrants and established players who had also pivoted toward AI-driven products.

In a September 2025 interview with The Times of London, Lanzone warned that the rise of artificial intelligence poses "a fundamental threat" to the existence of publishers, reflecting his broader concern about the impact of AI on the digital media ecosystem in which Yahoo operates.

Lanzone has spoken publicly about his philosophy of "sticking to what users need" as a guiding principle for Yahoo's product development, and has drawn analogies to other companies that underwent long-term brand transformations. In a July 2025 Fortune interview, he noted that "people think that Nike happened overnight or they were just brand geniuses — it took years," reflecting his view that Yahoo's turnaround would require sustained effort and patience.

In another Fortune profile from the same month, Lanzone discussed Yahoo's positioning as a "guide to the World Wide Web" in a new era shaped by AI and the evolving nature of search, while also acknowledging the nostalgia that the Yahoo brand evokes among users who remember its early dominance.

In a December 2025 Puck podcast interview, Lanzone discussed Yahoo's strategy under Apollo's ownership, addressing questions about whether a legacy internet brand can survive and thrive in an era of hyper-niche digital products and AI-driven competition. Despite external skepticism, he pointed to Yahoo's continued scale — with hundreds of millions of users and top-ranking digital properties — as evidence of the brand's enduring relevance.

In a separate December 2025 Puck article, Lanzone elaborated on Yahoo's AI, search, and scale strategy, discussing how the company is leveraging its vast user base and data assets to compete in the evolving landscape of AI-powered internet services.

Personal Life

Lanzone is married to his wife Shannon, and the couple have three children. The family resides in California. Lanzone has maintained a relatively private personal life compared to many technology executives, with limited public information available about his activities outside of his professional career.

Legacy

Jim Lanzone's career is notable for its sustained focus on consumer internet products and digital media across multiple phases of the internet's evolution. From search engines in the mid-2000s, to the emergence of online video aggregation in the late 2000s, to the digital transformation of legacy media companies in the 2010s, to the AI revolution of the 2020s, Lanzone has consistently occupied leadership positions at the intersection of technology and media.

His tenure at Ask.com coincided with a period of intense competition in the search industry, and his work there contributed to discussions about how smaller search engines could differentiate themselves in a market increasingly dominated by Google. The founding of Clicker.com demonstrated an early recognition of the challenges consumers would face navigating the fragmented landscape of online video — a problem that has only grown more complex in the years since.

At CBS Interactive, Lanzone managed one of the largest portfolios of digital media properties in the United States, gaining experience in operating diverse consumer internet brands at scale. This experience, combined with his earlier entrepreneurial and search industry background, positioned him for the challenge of leading Yahoo's turnaround under private equity ownership.

As CEO of Yahoo, Lanzone faces the task of transforming a company that many observers had written off into a competitive presence in the AI era. Whether this transformation succeeds will be a defining chapter of his career, but his efforts have drawn attention from major business and technology publications, reflecting the significance of Yahoo's continued presence in the internet landscape and the scale of the turnaround challenge he has undertaken.