Pronounced Dear-dra. Anchor & reporter @CNBC for 15 yrs. Now building something new at the frontier of media. Still a Leafs fan 🇨🇦
SF
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AI is no longer a segment. It’s a whole show. So I’m leaving CNBC at the end of the month to build it with @jaswu_
More soon. Reach us at dbosa@dbosalive.com jwu@dbosalive.com
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.@jlanzone and his team are a force and a big part of why I wanted to partner with Yahoo Finance. Have seen firsthand how fast they move & how much ambition there is for what's next
we're making a bet on AI & on an enormous audience trying to make sense of how its changing business and markets and society
NEW: In 2021, Apollo acquired a massive internet business for ~$5B.
Just 5 years later, it's become *one of the fastest-returning deals in the firm's history.*
700M monthly users. Billions in revenue. And an enormous distribution advantage that would be nearly impossible to replicate today.
Apollo's Reed Rayman recruited Jim Lanzone (@jlanzone) to lead the turnaround.
The company? @Yahoo.
I sat down with CEO Jim Lanzone, one of the internet industry's most accomplished turnaround executives, to go inside @apolloglobal's PE M&A playbook for Yahoo, the economics of the acquisition, & why this may be one of the most underrated assets in tech.
The numbers:
› ~$5B acquisition
› 700M monthly users, including 100M+ each across Yahoo Finance & Sports
› 75% direct traffic, with ~75% of daily users logged in
› Hundreds of millions in annual ad-tech losses addressed through restructuring
› Major divestitures including AOL, TechCrunch & Edgecast
› One of Apollo's fastest-returning deals, with Jim saying they're now "playing with house money"
› Newer search companies valued at 6X Yahoo despite having a fraction of its users, revenue & profitability
But the most interesting part of this deal is the operator.
Before Yahoo, Jim helped drive a 50X stock increase at Ask Jeeves, grew CBS Interactive from 70M to 220M users, and led Tinder.
And unlike the traditional PE playbook of aggressive cost extraction, PE micromanagement, Apollo backed an experienced product executive to restructure the business, rebuild its leadership, & reinvest in growth.
Now Yahoo is moving from turnaround to comeback, with an entirely rebuilt product ecosystem, its own AI search engine through Yahoo Scout, and a potential path back to the public markets.
We get into what it's really like operating under Apollo, the leadership decisions behind the turnaround, the value of internet distribution at scale, and why some startups with less than 0.1% of Yahoo's users command higher valuations.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Jim Lanzone, CEO of Yahoo
(01:33) How Apollo bought Yahoo for $4.8B
(04:16) Taking over a company in the middle of COVID
(07:22) Is private equity really the villain?
(12:42) The mistake that handed Google the internet
(16:09) Where Yahoo's 700M monthly users come from
(17:07) Why Yahoo sold AOL & TechCrunch
(21:21) "You can't skip levels of the video game"
(27:58) Why people still trust Yahoo in the AI era
(30:26) How Yahoo Scout competes with ChatGPT & Perplexity
(33:48) Saying no to the AI gold rush?
(37:31) From turnaround to comeback
(39:42) One of the fastest paybacks in Apollo history
(42:50) The biggest mistake companies make at scale
(44:21) Silicon Valley startups are now worth more than Yahoo with 0.1% of its users
(46:25) Why Yahoo is ready for the next crash
(48:57) Barry Diller, Tinder & the tweet that predicted Yahoo
(54:36) Is Yahoo finally back?
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Jensen first, then @nebiusai CEO Akardy. Got your AI trade surrounded
GTC marathon kicks off tomorrow
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Next stop— Berlin.
My exclusive with @JensenHuang, live this Wednesday right after his GTC keynote
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Microsoft is talking to AI labs about running on its own Maia chips. I asked cloud chief Scott Guthrie if OpenAI or Anthropic could be among them. His answer: “various discussions with lots of different AI labs,” but “nothing to announce right now.”
If one signs on, Maia goes from cost-saver to something Microsoft can sell, like Google’s TPUs.
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Deirdre Bosa retweeted
New Anthropic IPO reporting with the🐐@LesliePicker:
Anthropic to disclose new revenue numbers as AI lab financials become central to tech trade 💸
Anthropic plans to disclose its Q3 financials for the first time at a meeting with potential investors on Wednesday as the AI giant giant prepares for what could be the largest initial public offering in history @CNBC cnbc.com/2026/10/13/anthropi…
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Deirdre Bosa retweeted
Last night Dee Bosa conducted a great interview with Scott Guthrie of $MSFT, which is now fully engaged in the holy trinity of inference chips, LLMs and hyperscaled data centers. Some really good and clear insights here, without too much jargon.
Live with Microsoft's Cloud Chief @scottgu on Maia 300 nitter.siddz.com/i/broadcasts/1AKEmvYVn…
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Narrowing the “cone of uncertainty"
Microsoft’s custom AI chips are a hedge against uncertain demand. When forecasts change every week and data centers take 2–3 years to build..... getting more AI out of the same power and budget gives Microsoft room to adjust.
"In a world where power is constrained, land is constrained, and materials are
constrained... everything you can do to achieve more with less ultimately helps in the build out phase that we're in right now" - MSFT cloud chief @scottgu
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Live with Microsoft's Cloud Chief @scottgu on Maia 300 nitter.siddz.com/i/broadcasts/1AKEmvYVn…
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Going live with Microsoft's Cloud Chief @scottgu in a few mins.
piped.video/watch?v=4dVWeo6V…
MSFT is back at $4t and with Maia it now owns both ends of its AI stack
Its integrating the compute layer with its own chips... already owns the apps and the harness (Copilot, GitHub, Foundry).... and in the middle, stays model-agnostic (running OpenAI, its own MAI models, Anthropic and open source)
The bet is that models get commoditized, and the money goes to whoever serves them cheapest and owns the customer.
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MSFT is back at $4t and with Maia it now owns both ends of its AI stack
Its integrating the compute layer with its own chips... already owns the apps and the harness (Copilot, GitHub, Foundry).... and in the middle, stays model-agnostic (running OpenAI, its own MAI models, Anthropic and open source)
The bet is that models get commoditized, and the money goes to whoever serves them cheapest and owns the customer.
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Microsoft’s biggest custom chip push yet, as power and data center constraints force hyperscalers to squeeze more AI out of every megawatt.
I’m talking with cloud chief @scottgu today, live at 12:45p PT / 3:45p ET. Watch here on X or on YouTube: piped.video/watch?v=4dVWeo6V…
Today we are announcing our biggest bet yet on our own silicon.
Starting next calendar year, we will scale our Maia family to multi-gigawatt deployments, making it the primary inference system for our own product and services.
And we’re introducing Maia 300, which delivers 40% more tokens per watt compared to leading GPU-based systems.
We are already deploying Maia 200 across the US, Europe, and Australia, delivering up to 1.7x more tokens per watt across experiences in Teams and Copilot.
Our goal is to build on the full-stack efficiency gains we’ve already seen, while continuing to bring the latest innovations from across the ecosystem into our fleet.
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NEWS: Microsoft launches Maia 300 and will make Maia its primary AI inference system at multi-gigawatt scale from 2027. The AI buildout is increasingly about inference and how many tokens you can get out of every megawatt.
Microsoft cloud chief Scott Guthrie @scottgu joins me live at 12:45p PT / 3:45p ET on here and YouTube
piped.video/watch?v=4dVWeo6V…
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This came up in my conversation with @satyanadella a few weeks ago:
“With these powerful AI agents, you kind of have an insider risk… the attack can just come from the agent itself"
Expands on it here--
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Great conversation with @jlanzone @Jasonmaynard @niravtolia @1PasswordCEO
talked about the rise of consumer agents & what it will actually take for them to work: identity and trust, understanding what we want, personal context, and ultimately human connection
Another great Khanference in the books. Thank you @dottkhan!
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XNRGY founder and CEO Wais Jalali on data center jobs:
Electrical engineer: $100k a few years ago → $500k now
Plumber: $65–75k → $300k (& they’re getting poached by nearby sites)
The other AI talent war. From @dottkhan Khanference
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China being very good at this is precisely why America needs an open source strategy. Theres too much at stake to sit this out.
my piece from earlier this year:
piped.video/watch?v=lWMebfCc…
Reflection joins the list of Nvidia & Thinking Machines who have released their strongest models and come up behind Chinese counterparts. There's a lot of ways people will overthink this, but the clearest takeaway should be that the Chinese are very very good at building LLMs.
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