Yahoo taps Tinder’s CEO to be its new leader

By Jordan Valinsky, CNN Business

Yahoo has hired away Tinder’s top executive to become its new chief executive officer.

Apollo Management Group, which recently bought the ailing search engine for $5 billion, announced Friday that Jim Lanzone will be Yahoo’s new CEO as of September 27. He’s succeeding Guru Gowrappan, who has led Yahoo since 2018 and will now shift to a senior adviser role.

The move comes just four months after Verizon announced it would sell Yahoo to Apollo for $5 billion.

Lanzone has been the CEO of Tinder for about a year and helped revamp the popular dating app during his tenure. Previously he led digital operations for CBS about about a decade and has also held executive roles at IAC.

“With his experience and proven management skills, we are confident Jim is the right leader to steward Yahoo through a transformational new phase that can leverage the best of Yahoo’s platform and performance to reach new heights,” said Yahoo Chairman and Apollo Partner Reed Rayman in a press release.

Yahoo added that it will “invest significantly in the user experience and develop exciting new offerings that can build on its premier brands in sports, finance, news, technology and more.”

Verizon sale of Yahoo to Apollo is a deal that also includes AOL. Verizon, which said it will retain a 10% stake in the spinoff, had purchased AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 and followed up by buying Yahoo at a similar price two years later.

The unit was briefly named Oath, but Verizon signaled that its plan to take on Amazon, Google and Facebook was essentially a waste when it took a $4.6 billion writedown on Oath in 2018.

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