The Yahoo Comeback: Jim Lanzone on Reviving a Tech Icon

13:23Michael C. G. O'Hara:Our thesis was if you could get that asset at the right price, and it was around$5 billion. And if you look around, everybody in the top 10 Comscore internet companies, they're all trillion-dollar companies. You could work with that. And so, again, I could go through it, but we set about the turnaround process using those raw ingredients. And that's where we are today.

13:46Rebecca Hurst:What was the hardest decision you had to make when you took over? Was it cutting, restructuring, betting on a new product? What was really difficult for you?

13:56Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, you knew all that coming in. You knew that there was going to have to be some turnover on the team. You also, and this has been true, every time I come into a new company, you also find a lot of talent. and can redeploy them in new ways. So step one is always rebuilding the team, getting great people involved. As a CEO, especially if something is big, you can't do everything. And so that always is step one. And so, yeah, from there, there are certain products that you know, like search or email, that are huge and things you need to invest in to get back on track. and then ones where, you know, in the case of email, it hadn't really been upgraded in, I mean, literally over a decade at those levels.

14:45Michael C. G. O'Hara:And so when you start putting those things in place, you can start to get early returns. The hardest decision was probably how early on we had to essentially renovate our ad tech group, which was something that both AOL and Yahoo had spent many years acquiring a lot of companies, 30 plus companies.

15:05Jim Lanzone:What do you mean renovate? How does one renovate an ad tech group?

15:10Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, we had to make some really hard decisions about what we were going to invest in and what we really didn't have a right to, where we didn't have a right to win. And so we were doing a lot of things, a lot of different businesses. We had a native advertising business. We had a supply side platform. And we shut those down. In some cases, we outsourced those to others. And then we decided, well, where we can win is our DSP, our demand side platform. And we're going to invest. So we're going to invest there. So that decision, my second year there, or actually made the decision before my first anniversary, required having a lot of people leave the company and doing deals to outsource things that we had been building for years.

15:55Michael C. G. O'Hara:But that decision saved hundreds of millions of dollars a year on the cost side, but really strategically let us refocus on something that could really be a big asset creation opportunity, which is our DSP, where we are now the world's largest private DSP competing with Trade Desk, Google, Google's version of that, Amazon's version of that. And I think we're still early days now in innovating in that space.

16:21Jim Lanzone:Well, I want to talk about what's ahead. But one of the things I like about your career, Jim, is the eclectic nature of it. And I know I've had an eclectic career myself. One of the benefits is you get to work with all kinds of cool people. And I think of your career, you've got Les Moonves, you've got Barry Diller, you mentioned Jerry Yang. I mean, there's so many different people. I'm curious who stands out for you as either a mentor or just somebody. I mean, these are personalities. I've met them myself. And how has that influenced you? And when you look back, who do you think of fondly or maybe not so fondly?

16:58Jim Lanzone:I mean, We're open to both here. Give us all the dirt, Jim.

17:03Michael C. G. O'Hara:When you've been around doing this this long, and again, I've done consumer internet now for basically 28 years and have had those different times, I can bore you with how many of those are influential on me.

17:17Jim Lanzone:No, go ahead. I want to hear. Because they really all are. Name drop. Feel free.

17:21Michael C. G. O'Hara:Including, you know, I did, when I left Barrie and IEC, I did a startup from scratch. And Bill Gurley, who wrote for Fortune for many years, and Jeff Yang were my two main investors. And the idea for that came from another big mentor of mine, Dave Goldberg, who passed away. Yeah, I knew Dave. Many years ago, who was a very close friend, but also a huge mentor. We came up, well, he did Survey Monkey when I went to do Clicker. But the whiteboard was in his EIR office at Benchmark of doing the future of video search. And then Blake Kerkorian, another very close friend who passed away a year later, who was the founder of Slingbox, was also on the board of that startup and was a huge friend but also a huge mentor of mine.

18:07Michael C. G. O'Hara:Yeah, you learn different things from all of them along the way. and obviously with Barry, I remember we were in the back of a car and I've always been fascinated by, well, by media, but also by the history of things. And so I would always pepper him, like, how did you green light airplane?

18:27Rebecca Hurst:And I get the story about he and Michael Eisner

18:29Michael C. G. O'Hara:had offices next to each other and he heard laughs coming out and they both had been reading the script and he says, but before that was the Kentucky Fried Movie. And I mean, you just hear this history of how they do these things. And I remember him saying to me, you know, I wonder if, this is in the back of the car in like 2007, like, you know, I wonder if we started today if we would have been as successful. And obviously 18 years later, the answer is of course. Barry Diller was so, is one of the world's best entrepreneurs, it turns out, you know, over the last 30 years. But his way of drilling into the core idea of things, always, I remember him saying, there's always another way around the mountain.

19:06Michael C. G. O'Hara:And I always say that to my team if we get stuck on something.

19:09Jim Lanzone:You know, he's told me once the hardest thing to hire for is curiosity, which always stuck with me because he's right. And you're very curiosity driven. That's the way you talk to people, isn't it? Just you mentioned you just go and you try to get to know them.

19:24Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, that's part of his drilling down on the core idea, you know, and not just going just off the data, which, again, is also very important. I'm a product person at heart. And, you know, if I take a new job, drilling into the data is probably the first thing I do. But between him, Les, who ran, obviously, that company very successfully as a public company, but was also the number one network at CBS Interactive. And knowing that it also was about gut and the core idea. And I have other friends like Tony Fidel who helped. Of Nest. Of Nest, but also created the iPod and helped create the iPhone.

20:01Michael C. G. O'Hara:And there's a lot of it that is the art side, too. And I really believe in the right brain side of this, the taste side of this. And in the early stages of a turnaround, you can't always show that side. But then you always get to the point, right? At CBS, the initial challenge was they had bought CNET, which was a struggling public company. And it needed to be turned around first. The reward for that was we created CBS All Access, which was one of the first streaming platforms. And we launched that in 2014, five years before HBO Max and Disney Plus. And that was, at the end of the day, a gut decision.

20:37Michael C. G. O'Hara:You didn't know. We got criticized when we launched that, that it wasn't going to work. And how dare one network have its own streaming service? So, yeah, I've learned that both of those are very important.

20:50Rebecca Hurst:For us, I feel like, or at least for me and maybe you, Diane, when I think Yahoo, I immediately think media. And I think it's just, you know, we're journalists. We have all these guys there. My sister still has her Yahoo email account. As I told you earlier, I was a CompuServe girl. an AOL. So sorry, sorry, Jim. Still have all those URLs. Yeah, exactly. But I'm wondering about, you know, from a non-journalist perspective, how do you kind of view the media industry at Yahoo? And just in general, how are you looking at what's next for your journalists?

21:23Michael C. G. O'Hara:Yeah. Well, part of what we figured out when we got here was, again, you do the forensics on the company, what makes it successful. The history of why Yahoo even got into media at all was not by being investigative journalists or on the enterprising side of news, but by being the first and best aggregator of news and being a partner to people like Fortune by sending them traffic, sharing the revenue. It's funny to see AI companies now trying to ink those deals. We have thousands of those deals that go back 20 plus years with companies. We still operate that way today. If you go to our page, we are sending traffic to Business Insider who would have, you know, those sort of help them be successful.

22:08Michael C. G. O'Hara:We then, you know, accentuate that with our own journalists who are providing context to that. So whether it's sports or Brian and Julian team and finance. That really is where Yahoo is strong in how we do journalism. And over the last three years, as we figure out what's our role in that ecosystem, I think our role is to be the trusted guide, to be purple, to be neutral, and to help our users, wherever they may fall on any spectrum, get to the content that they're looking for and be partners with people.

22:47Jim Lanzone:Asset light. It sounds like an asset light strategy if I look at the humans as assets. Does that position you well for the next generation of where we go with media?

22:57Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, we do. Look, we also have a lot of humans. If you come up to our studio uptown, we have an amazing studio. And by the end of this year, we'll be doing 50 hours a week of original programming just in sports. So we also are producing media. But again, I would say in service of helping our users accomplish their goals, and that is a little bit different. Because in finance, they're trying to make money or save money. In sports, they're trying to beat the snot out of their friends in fantasy. Or they're trying to be a smarter fan about their team that they're following. It always is in service of something that our users are trying to get done.

23:39Michael C. G. O'Hara:And so I would just say our role in the ecosystem of media, I think it's very important. Because we have a huge amount of traffic and we send a huge amount of traffic. And we're very thoughtful about how we do that and what that product needs to look like. and how we partner to keep a very healthy media ecosystem. We're big believers in that. If we violate trust with our users, and I would say over time, that is something that probably as the different variations of Yahoo and different owners of Yahoo, it probably wavered a bit. But we knew that is the first thing. We have to be the trusted source for people.

24:13Michael C. G. O'Hara:And that means we also have to have trusted partners. Like we can't be sending people to clickbait or to, you know, attention vampires who are just trying to get you, you know, and we got to send them to the highest quality content.

24:26Rebecca Hurst:Yeah. It seems like you have competitors kind of in a bunch of different spaces. You have like Google, dare I say you have other media competitors. And AI.

24:35Jim Lanzone:I keep waiting for the deep fake news call and the deep fake sites.

24:38Rebecca Hurst:Yeah, I think, you know, AI and chatGT. Misinformation, disinformation. Yeah, what they're going to do to search is wild. Who do you view as like your biggest competitors and how are you fighting back?

24:48Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, Eric, when we did the original Google deal in 2002, Eric Schmidt, people said, how could you do that? I mean, we were the fourth ranked surgeon. We survived everybody else. We beat Lycos.

25:01Rebecca Hurst:So people were questioning it back then. Oh, yeah.

25:03Michael C. G. O'Hara:How could you do that? And Eric had the term co-opetition. As he would. And we were public and they weren't. So we were almost their tracking stock for the first couple of years. And so, yeah, I mean, we helped each other on that front. And maybe we competed for users. But from our standpoint, we always had to have a unique reason for being relative to them. That's true of anything that I've ever run, you know, CBS products, Yahoo products. I mean, they all have to be unique. So that's how I think about it. If you talk to my team, though, you would hear every single one of our team say the same thing, which is we really don't get distracted by competition.

25:44Michael C. G. O'Hara:You have to keep tabs, obviously, on the way the ecosystem is changing. When I took this job in September 21, it was still 14 months before ChatGPT launched. That changed the world. That created opportunities and threats for us. I think they're more market-driven then instead of individual companies and products necessarily. And think about taking over Yahoo. We have so much to do that I really think we're competing against ourselves more than we are anybody else, at least for now. Like we have just so many things, if we get those right, that we will keep growing. We are growing a really healthy clip again now.

26:22Michael C. G. O'Hara:And so that's really what I focus on.

26:25Jim Lanzone:So let's talk about that a little bit. And I want to unpack your background a bit more, too. But you said it's early days. What are you focused on right now? I mean, in terms of your priorities, the pain points, I mean, what should we be expecting in terms of what's around the corner? Because you're private. You can tell us. No reg FD. That's been great, by the way.

26:47Michael C. G. O'Hara:I still think of myself as an entrepreneur core and a founder. Yeah. But I've then wound up in all these public companies and larger companies. It does feel good to be able to do this in private for a while. and Apollo as the full owners of Yahoo, we have some other investors, but it really is an Apollo company. They've been great because we were one of the fastest returning deals in the history of Apollo and that's enabled us to be all upside. And so they really have been letting us do this right and play a little bit of a longer game than you might get normally in private equity. And so I think about that product by product and in terms of like what we do, you know, from here.

27:34Michael C. G. O'Hara:And I would say we are, the reason I think it's still early days is step one was just getting, fixing the things that were wrong. And you'd be surprised, like how little this company, even on the very backend had moved to the cloud. Really? I'm just saying something as basic as - Even though my horizon as an owner,

27:53Jim Lanzone:I'm surprised by that.

27:54Michael C. G. O'Hara:You'd be surprised. And now I would say, Is every pixel of that something that I want to put my name next to and say that is the best product that that can be? No. You know, I think there are 10 levels left to go here on what we can do. And I also always tell the team we can't just be brats and, you know, skip, I always say skip levels of the video game. You know, you got to earn it every level by every level to earn the right to innovate and progress. And again, now with AI, that's added a whole other set of things that we need to do. I feel like we've been out ahead of that. We're one of the first ones to integrate, let's say, AI into email to help people create, search, edit their mail.

28:38Michael C. G. O'Hara:There are other parts of that that are coming. Same thing in search. Even things like fantasy sports have AI integrated to help you manage your team. there's even a smack talking email that comes out from AI every Sunday night whether you won or lost think about finance this category and how it helps you build your portfolio so besides the basics we have to do that and then there's innovation and our hopes and dreams for where all these products can go next I'd lastly say the brand is another very important part of this because the Yahoo brand did go through the ringer for a lot of years.

29:20Jim Lanzone:That exclamation point used to always piss me off. I like it.

29:26Michael C. G. O'Hara:Yeah, people love it.

29:27Rebecca Hurst:It used to. Now I have a different view. So how do you, is it a marketing push to revamp a brand or how do you revamp a brand that kind of, as you said, went through the ringer?

29:38Michael C. G. O'Hara:Yeah. I mean, it takes time.

29:41Rebecca Hurst:Yeah.

29:41Michael C. G. O'Hara:You really have to earn that. and again having having seen that movie a few times um the thing about yahoo that that is awesome is that even though there is a bit of that um you know that history and so people are going to want to ask that question and we're going to really have to earn it there's also this interesting latent kind of love for the brand that is in there and people um especially as you kind of get out of the valley a bit. And I think the valley has started to feel good about what we've been doing with the company. But to get to the, you know, let's say the average American, there is some latent love in there if you do it right.

30:24Michael C. G. O'Hara:And including, you know, half of our audience today is Gen Z and millennials. Yeah. We have a massive audience.

30:29Rebecca Hurst:We will point that out. Half of them weren't born when Yahoo was created. Yeah.

30:33Michael C. G. O'Hara:And so everybody's using Yahoo at a certain point in time. And we're top five. We touch 90 % of all the U.S. any given month. But again, as a brand, you have to earn that right to where they're proud to be using Yahoo and be talking about it. And so that's brick by brick over time. And we've started down that pathway. Step one, you have to have great products. If you don't have that, people are going to talk smack about the brand, let alone love it. But I think we're on the pathway there. And then we started with small things up to big things. On the small side, we threw a really interesting event at South by Southwest where we partnered with this retro kitschy brand called Pool Suite.

31:20Michael C. G. O'Hara:And we had like a 90s vibe party that everyone was like, oh, this is the coolest party at South by Southwest. I can't believe it's Yahoo. So you're leaning into the 90s. I love it. And that was like a small one. Yeah. On the larger end, we did a Super Bowl ad this year for the first time in 23 years. but we did it in a super unique way where we weren't asking for anything. We weren't trying to market our way to success. It was just getting the brand back out there. And again, we did it uniquely. We had Bill Murray. Bill Murray is a very unique character. We only bought the ad locally. So it was actually very cost effective as well.

31:57Michael C. G. O'Hara:And then the ad was really just a 15 second teaser that got people into an online experience using Yahoo Mail where you would email back and forth with Bill Murray and he would send you additional videos that were vignettes that told this story that he wrote with his writing partners.

32:14Rebecca Hurst:How'd you convince Bill Murray to do it? He's everywhere. It was harder.

32:18Michael C. G. O'Hara:He's a good guy. Harder than you think. It was only the second ad he's ever done.

32:22Rebecca Hurst:What was the pitch? How'd you do it?

32:24Michael C. G. O'Hara:Actually, he famously has no agent and no manager. and you have to call a 1-800 number. We somehow worked it through to get his attention and explain to him. And Bill is interesting. He likes the underdog. And he loved the idea of working with Yahoo to help us kind of fight back. And I would argue he almost really took us under his wing. Another example of that is that one of the things that they conceived of was that he would answer those emails live on camera at halftime.

33:03Rebecca Hurst:And up until the day before the game, we didn't know if

33:05Michael C. G. O'Hara:it was going to happen. I mean, he really, he's a busy guy. He was like in a band. He played a concert the night before.

33:10Rebecca Hurst:Can he type that fast? I don't even know.

33:13Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, so not only did he do it, but we announced it only 20 minutes before it happened through social channels. And we went up getting millions of people up against the Kendrick Lamar halftime show tuning in to watch Bill on camera and he would, he would, he was actually like talking to the user who emailed in and he would answer it live. He would do it into a microphone. He was, he was saying what he,

33:36Jim Lanzone:the beauty of improv. Yeah.

33:37Michael C. G. O'Hara:And then he continued to do it the entire second half.

33:40Jim Lanzone:Wow.

33:41Michael C. G. O'Hara:Didn't have, didn't have to do it. Um, and, uh, and so it was a personal thing for, for Bill. Um, and so, yeah, so I'm still in touch with him and he's an amazing guy.

33:50Jim Lanzone:I can picture you, the CEO sort of emailing Bill Murray and getting good advice from him.

33:57Michael C. G. O'Hara:But he wouldn't do it if it wasn't authentic. And I think, again, if I were to say what the take on rehabilitating the brand has to be is it has to be authentic. We can't be too thirsty about wanting attention or trying to, again, classically market your way there.

34:14Jim Lanzone:You know, one of the benefits of working in different roles starting companies, you discover what you're good at. you know when when did you discover that you were particularly good at the things that you

34:26Michael C. G. O'Hara:think are helping you in this role uh that's a great question i look i i the whole way i started doing this was i i went to law school i hated it i would have left but i met my wife the first minute of law school and we were living together two around to court each other we were like living together two weeks later and that was 31 years ago. We've been together that whole time. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't have stayed. And I had some friends who did the business school program. So I, with no experience, applied and got in. And that summer somehow wound up working for a company that was digital in the old school way.

35:04Michael C. G. O'Hara:They sold public records to like law firms and, you know, businesses and private detectives whenever through, you know, dial up. And my job was to get them an internet website. And the CEO thought I was, you know, I was an early adopter of the internet, obviously, and used it a lot. So I copied the fantasy baseball website that I used at the time. And we turned that into, by the end of the year, a top 100 website. I worked with the engineers to build it. I did all the PR. I put the ads on the page. I did everything. And so that led to me joining a startup while I was still in school. And we raised money.

35:40Michael C. G. O'Hara:And so I was always a product person. So I've always come at this when I got to ask, I was the head of product. Our turnaround was so successful that my boss, Steve Berkowitz, who was the CEO, got hired to run all of internet for Microsoft. Satya reported to him. And that's how I got promoted to CEO. So I only got, you know, I never really applied for a job. I always started companies that have been acquired. And in this case, I was part of Apollo's research team essentially for whether you should do Yahoo. But I come at this as a product person, as a founder, not as big boss man, corporate person.

36:18Michael C. G. O'Hara:And I think the best internet companies are still, or technology companies are still run that way, whether you are the founder or you're not. My job is to push, to be the, you know, to determine whether something is good enough and to really drive that, obviously to help set the strategy and the roadmap, but to be a source of momentum. And that grind of doing a startup or doing a turnaround, that's all I've ever done. And so the way to do that is you push and with great people around you. And that's what we do.

36:50Rebecca Hurst:If you could go back in time and give advice to Yahoo's leadership during the dot-com boom, what would you want to say to them as a CEO today?

37:01Michael C. G. O'Hara:I really, I mean this in a non.

37:05Rebecca Hurst:Yes.

37:06Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, here's the thing. Not everybody, if everyone couldn't hear the whisper, it was by Facebook.

37:11Rebecca Hurst:The ghost whisper over here, yeah. First of all, everybody tried to buy Google.

37:16Michael C. G. O'Hara:Ask Jeeves tried to buy Google.

37:18Rebecca Hurst:Really?

37:19Michael C. G. O'Hara:They couldn't hit the number, so they bought a company called Direct Hit, which actually was the inventor of all user behavior algorithms that Ask eventually licensed to Google. So there's always another way around the mountain if you don't get it.

37:33Jim Lanzone:Success comes in many forms.

37:36Michael C. G. O'Hara:I really don't know that anyone has come to put ourselves in the position of a public company, of the biggest internet company in the year 2000. The market crashed, I think, in March of 2000. We were writing our S1 to go public, my startup. And then one by one, everything crashed. So AltaVista didn't get out. And then this happened. So how do you go back and tell them not to outsource search to Google? or if you do make it white label don't give them a link i remember when priceline was having us

38:04Jim Lanzone:bid for groceries and web fans so things change but well let's let's put you then circa 2025 and you were in a big legacy brand if you were starting out now you know entrepreneurial as you are what would you be doing would you be doubling down on you know some of the ai companies? Because here we are at the dawn, we had the internet, we had 2.0, and here we are at the dawn of a whole new age of innovation. Obviously, you're navigating through that, trying to bring in those tools and that innovation, but what would you be doing at this point starting out?

38:43Michael C. G. O'Hara:Man, there's so many ways. I would be founding a company, and it would have to be in the AI space, obviously um for my background and and by the way my son is now just turned 24 and is his second year out of college he's a programmer at an ai startup um called mino uh and um shout out to mino good well done son but um but by the way there are others uh so you know one of one of my longtime colleagues who's a board member has a very successful startup called array that is uh Yashica has been defying the next generation of labor and is deploying real people and humans. They talk about manufacturing moving to China and needing to bring it back.

39:30Michael C. G. O'Hara:There's already a lot of great people in the US doing this. His company does that. It definitely deploys AI and technology. But starting great companies doesn't have to be that. But if it was me, of course, it's two.

39:43Jim Lanzone:But you're also trying to recruit great talent. So why do they want to come to Yahoo right now?

39:51Michael C. G. O'Hara:Look, it's a lot of places you go. First of all, you're going to be a cog in the machine. So a lot of people who come here, and by the way, it's a lot easier to recruit in year three than it was in year one. We've got some momentum now. So we've got some people's attention. By the way, as an example, we'll get at least 1 ,000 applications for every person that we hire as an engineer. So we do get a lot of incoming. But it's to be able to have that impact. Number one is personally they can have that impact. Number two, we have one of the top five largest audiences in the U.S. and globally to actually deploy the thing that you're building, which is the hardest part of any consumer internet startup is actually getting a real audience.

40:39Michael C. G. O'Hara:And we start with that as kind of a late stage startup again. And we already have that audience. So that really does attract people.

40:47Rebecca Hurst:Jim, I have a bit of a fun one for you because I can tell that you are a very good storyteller. Besides getting to email and meet Bill Murray, what is the wildest or most unexpected thing that you have done as CEO at Yahoo? Or just coolest that you want to tell us about?

41:01Michael C. G. O'Hara:The Bill Murray one must have. Is that top five? Would have been. Yeah, it would have been. I mean, I'll say an interesting brand moment. I was sitting in Levi's Stadium, which is the 49ers home, and I'm a longtime season ticket holder.

41:19Jim Lanzone:Indolences? I'm just kidding. No. You're doing really well.

41:22Michael C. G. O'Hara:The Niners have – look, it's been a great run. Never mind. Super Bowl is next. We clearly don't know sports. We've been robbed a couple times. No, I know sports. I just fan of different teams. But I was sitting there, and I guess I didn't realize this before I took the job, But every time the Niners score a touchdown, up on the screen, it turns into a Yahoo Sports highlight of the touchdown. At the end, there's actually a yodel with the logo going across the page. And all 80 ,000 people scream Yahoo at the top of their lungs in a yodel. In the middle of Silicon Valley.

42:02Rebecca Hurst:Yeah.

42:02Michael C. G. O'Hara:And that's when I knew there was something to work with here brand-wise, that it could be done.

42:08Rebecca Hurst:Had you planned like the Yahoo Yodel? Is that a thing? No, I inherited that.

42:12Michael C. G. O'Hara:That was a deal that was done 10 years prior during Marissa's time. That was still – and I renewed it because it's just such a – yeah, such a great moment that was such a surprise for sure.

42:28Rebecca Hurst:I slightly want to ask you to recreate the yodel right here, but I feel like that might be unfair.

42:33Michael C. G. O'Hara:I almost, we do have, you know, the easy button. We do have yodel button, easy buttons. Oh, that's the branding. Hilariously, they are, we have an amazing social team and they've done things like for April Fool's this year, they created a, I don't know if you know about the touch grass, go touch grass, and they created a keyboard that was all covered in grass. But another thing they did was they actually, for a limited time offer, they sold those yodel buttons on there.

43:04Jim Lanzone:Okay, we have to do the yodel. Do you know the yodel?

43:07Michael C. G. O'Hara:They sold out in five minutes. What? And they were like$20 each. Who's buying these? That was another surprising time for sure. Sounds like you have a lot of fun over there.

43:20Jim Lanzone:Would you ever change the yodel? Is it too iconic?

43:22Michael C. G. O'Hara:We did in a way that you wouldn't have noticed.

43:25Jim Lanzone:This is our sneaky way to get you to do it.

43:27Michael C. G. O'Hara:I shortened it by two seconds.

43:28Jim Lanzone:Oh. So no, was it Yahoo? I can't even do it. You wouldn't. Come on, why am I the one doing the Yahoo yodel? You're the Yahoo CEO.

43:36Michael C. G. O'Hara:It's too, I gotta have it. So I'm not asking you to sing. It'll get clipped by my team and used against me.

43:41Rebecca Hurst:Yeah, this is the TikTok clip that we're gonna do.

43:44Michael C. G. O'Hara:Company all hands meetings. Yeah. But no, look, even having Jerry back this year and showing a picture of the trailer that he and David founded the company in. Or we actually showed him that not only are we back to his original mission and how we've articulated that kind of made him well up a little bit, but the original Yahoo website, the one that was pre-incorporation, so you said 94. Incorporation was 95, but they did have a website available in 1994. It said, Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web, dot, dot, dot, always under construction. And we took that and we made it like the number one core operating principle for us that Yahoo, you know, look, we're still here after 30 years, a lot of ups and downs.

44:37Michael C. G. O'Hara:We think we're doing, we have some ups now and we're on the right track. But if you couldn't, you know, kill us before and, you know, we're on a track now where you could see another 30 years if we do this right. So always under construction to us meant that, you know, everything about technology may change, right? It's think about from the original time, video now and social and AI and just all the different parts of this. We still have to help people accomplish their goals using Yahoo. Make sense of the world. And so we always have to be adapting. And that really is guiding how we think about the company now.

45:16Jim Lanzone:I'm thinking of Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, always be closing. Different concept. You know, one thing that I feel bonds us all here and, you know, Aura should really give us product placement money. But we're all wearing Aura rings for those who can. And so I often think of the fact that to be a CEO these days is to be an elite athlete. And Kristen and I are not putting ourselves in your category, of course. But talk about how you manage your day, your energy, because I certainly look at my ratings every morning and consider my sleep and my energy and such. How did you do last night? I never do well.

45:50Jim Lanzone:I don't like, but I...

45:51Rebecca Hurst:She never wants to answer the number of questions in sleep, by the way. Well, look, I think today was 70-something.

45:55Michael C. G. O'Hara:How much REM sleep did you get?

45:57Jim Lanzone:I got 23 % last night. It's pretty good, right? I operate on a different wavelength.

46:04Michael C. G. O'Hara:My wife and I also have eight sleep and it's amazing too. And it gives you a whole other score.

46:08Jim Lanzone:But I do think about the fact that it feels like the attention to the physicality of the job and health. And obviously there's many factors, but how do you manage that? And do you feel like you do it differently now? First of all, you've got tools and you're wearing this ring on your finger and how was your sleep last night i'd be remiss not to ask you took me a while to fall asleep and i crushed it oh good 25 percent rem i don't i think i had two hours two solid

46:38Michael C. G. O'Hara:hours of rem that was like a lot by the funny side stories that tom hale the ceo of aura and i were entrepreneurs in residence at red point ventures in 2008 when i left ic we're the only two and we're in a bullpen together um you know way back way back when um and uh is this you Are you supporting your friend? And then he worked at SurveyMonkey. That's right. So if you've been around a long time. You know them all.

47:02Rebecca Hurst:Yeah.

47:02Michael C. G. O'Hara:Yeah. So, no, look, I've gone through my fits and so. You know, when you have kids for the first time in your 30s and everything changes, you don't realize and you have to get your act together about staying in shape. And if you do something that you love, you work a lot. And this job, I also just travel a ton. I'm just on the road a lot for different events and conferences and for ad sales and whatever it is to our different offices. So it's harder.

47:31Jim Lanzone:Do you have any hacks you want to share? I don't.

47:35Michael C. G. O'Hara:Honestly, I think it is just the same as the grind of running a company. And again, I saw on a different podcast you asked somebody about a book. The book that always 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, I mean, it took years of building that company. And I think any company is like that. Early stage, late stage, if you're doing it right. I think it's the same thing with your health. It's the same thing with staying in touch with friends. Endurance. No, but nothing is just going to happen. You have to make it happen.

48:11Michael C. G. O'Hara:And that could be for getting on the treadmill or the elliptical or lifting weights or going for a run. It could be spending time with your spouse. It could be spending time with your kids. I make a really big effort not just to do that, but my mom passed away a couple years ago, so I spent a lot of time with my dad, but also friends. And so I've gone to two live concerts in the last week. Really? Which ones? Did you go to Avril Lavigne on Friday? Well, the last one I went to, no, on Friday night. Different demo. I was at, I was, well, I'm on the, I'm on the board of the Newport Folk Festival and jazz festival, which was like my passion project.

48:50Michael C. G. O'Hara:And, uh, I've done that for about 10 years. So that's more my jam on, on the music side. Uh, so I was at, uh, there's a band called the hold steady. Their lead singer is Craig Finn. He has a solo album that just came out. So his album release party was Friday night at the Bowery ballroom and Kathleen Edwards, who's this amazing, um, folk indie singer out of Canada, uh, opened and played in the band. He had like an all-star band with a guy from War on Drugs in it. And so my wife and I, we did Date Night and went to that. That's amazing.

49:23Jim Lanzone:That's Newport. So, I mean, I always think of that now with the Bob Dylan movie. But of course, you know, so you're a folk fan. That's interesting. Yeah.

49:30Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, that, you have to go look at some of the YouTube videos. The movie isn't exactly how that happened.

49:34Rebecca Hurst:No, I knew that. Well, I read the book and I was like, this is very different.

49:38Jim Lanzone:We vilify Pete Seeger too much perhaps? Yeah.

49:41Michael C. G. O'Hara:It was funny how it all works. One of my biggest mentors in life, who was a CBS board member, was a guy named Bruce Gordon, who was the chairman of Newport. We actually live across the hall from each other in New York as well. So Bruce and his wife are our family here in New York. But I was also friends before he passed away with George Wien, who was the founder. He was the creator of the music festival. He got a Grammy for creating. So if you go to Coachella or anything, it was because of George launching Newport Jazz originally and then Newport Folk. But yeah, hearing the old stories, again, I love it.

50:14Michael C. G. O'Hara:And hearing about Miles Davis and Nina Simone or how he had to get Led Zeppelin to play acoustic to chill the crowd out so like a riot wouldn't happen or what happened for real with Bob Dylan. Like you got all those. He just passed away a couple years ago at 96. But getting all the stories is always amazing.

50:32Rebecca Hurst:Well, now that we've taken this podcast completely out there.

50:34Michael C. G. O'Hara:I know like I sense the joy.

50:36Jim Lanzone:Where do you get the most joy out of your job? You get a lot of joy out of life, I sense.

50:41Michael C. G. O'Hara:Well, I definitely do. But I love, you know, my kids are always worried about how much I work. And I love it.

50:50Jim Lanzone:You never work a day again if you love what you do.

50:51Michael C. G. O'Hara:I mean, it's, again, it's the first, it's, in some way you're always working in a job like that. I mean, first of all, this is, this wasn't easy. It's not an easy one. There's also just a lot to it. Because if you go back to the conglomerate, there's just so many different things that we do. There's so many people. I love this team. I've always just been lucky to have great teams that are not just great at what they do, but just we always kind of we've always wound up having a cultural situation where we just all love hanging out. And and we have that. So I'm always in some ways dipping in and out of work.

51:28But again, it's also one reason it's just I truly am never, it's probably a noise, the team, but I'm kind of just never satisfied and think there's always some other thing to do or something we can do better or something on the roadmap that we need to get to.

51:43Michael C. G. O'Hara:And so I'm just always, my brain's just always firing on those things.

51:47Rebecca Hurst:Jim, I'm going to ask you later outside of the studio about the Newport Folk Festival lineup because I'm really excited about it this year. But before we go, is there anything that we haven't asked you that you wanted to share with us or tell us about?

52:00Michael C. G. O'Hara:Oh, man, I wouldn't know. We'd have to look at the comments to know whether we did or whether we were annoying people.

52:05Jim Lanzone:Always interactive with the audience. But paint us a little bit of a vision for what you want Yahoo to be. I mean, take us out as far as you want. But obviously, you said it's early days. So tell us what's your hope and aspiration there?

52:24Michael C. G. O'Hara:let's just say there's the company piece and then there's the um uh there there's the the product and piece and and i'd say or even the brand piece so yeah i let's work backwards 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 you know and it may be that it's a bit of a vintage modern vintage brand for if you are younger um but i think we can earn that you know other brands have done that. I think Chris has done an amazing job with that new balance is like one example. There's no reason, if our products are great, that we couldn't do the same thing.

53:01Michael C. G. O'Hara:The company's on a great track. I'd love to deliver for our investors and for our team to reward that. Whatever that winds up meaning, you know, all pre-IPO companies, you either go public or you get bought someday by someone who needs what you have. I think we're building a lot and have a lot the things other others might need um so that that all needs to happen um but again most of my day is going to be on the product side and and that evolution everything is obviously changing now more than it ever has um probably i mean i know talking to like some people they said oh it's bigger than the dawn of the internet but others think it's it could be bigger than the dawn of the industrial revolution i mean it could remains to be seen but if you go if you just stick to what users need, really need, not technology for technology's sake.

53:50Michael C. G. O'Hara:I saw this tweet. I can't remember who did it, but she said, I don't want AI to create art so that I have time to do my laundry. I want AI to do my laundry so that I have time to make art. And I think we can't be judgmental on our side about what our users need to get done, big or small. We need to create these products to help them do that that's clearly evolving um more and more is going to happen in an automated way helping you do things before you know that you need done maybe before you knew that you needed to be done or what that next step is in that pathway in categories we operate in now and i would say if we do this right we will earn the right to do it in other categories as well um that's where i want to get to that's what um you know that's what will create true loyalty and trust in our brand.

54:44Michael C. G. O'Hara:So I don't know if that sounds cheesy, but that's where I hope to get to. I love it. Thank you for joining us.

54:49Jim Lanzone:I look forward to it.

54:50Michael C. G. O'Hara:I appreciate spending the time.

54:52Jim Lanzone:Thanks.

55:02Jim Lanzone:Leadership Next is produced and edited by Jalon Ersoy. Our executive producer is Lydia Randall. Our head of video and audio is Adam Banicki. Our theme is by Jason Snell. Leadership Next is a production of Fortune Media. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. See you next time. Leadership Next episodes are produced by Fortune's editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.