Apollo Management Group, which recently bought the struggling search engine for $ 5 billion, announced on Friday that Jim Lanzone will be Yahoo’s new CEO effective September 27. He succeeds Guru Gowrappan, who has been running Yahoo since 2018 and will now transition to a senior advisor 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 for approximately a decade and also held senior positions at IAC.
“With his proven experience and management skills, we are confident that Jim is the right leader to lead Yahoo through a new phase of transformation that can leverage the best of Yahoo’s platform and performance to reach new summits, ”Yahoo chairman and Apollo partner Reed Rayman said in a press release.
Yahoo added that it “will invest significantly in user experience and develop exciting new offerings that can leverage its leading brands in sports, finance, news, sports, and entertainment. technology and more “.
The sale of Yahoo to Apollo by Verizon is a deal that also includes AOL. Verizon, which said it would retain a 10% stake in the spin-off, bought AOL for $ 4.4 billion in 2015 and bought Yahoo at a similar price two years later.
The unit was briefly named Oath, but Verizon reported that its plan to take over Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOG) and Facebook (FB) was essentially a waste when it took a $ 4.6 billion depreciation on Oath in 2018.
