In 1997, Lanzone co-founded eTour, an early provider of information retrieval and cost-per-lead services on the Web. By 1998, eTour had become a top 50 website and the Web's #1 ranked site in user frequency (1998 & 1999).[8] Lanzone continued to serve as president of eTour until it was acquired by Ask.com (then known as Ask Jeeves) in May 2001.
In addition to Ask.com's purchase of eTour, Lanzone was hired to lead product management and later served as senior vice president and general manager of Ask.com. Ask.com was purchased by Barry Diller's IAC in 2005, and shortly afterward, Lanzone was named CEO of Ask.com. He held this position until leaving IAC in 2008 to join Redpoint Ventures as entrepreneur in residence.[9] Upon his departure, Barry Diller credited Lanzone as "the principal executive responsible for Ask.com's turnaround".[10] One of Lanzone's primary achievements as CEO was the overhaul and rebranding of Ask Jeeves (renamed Ask.com). Noted technology reviewer Walt Mossberg praised the new site as being "richer and better organized than typical Google results"[11] and "took greater strides than Google with their user interface",[12] while Chris Sherman of Search Engine Land called Ask.com the "Apple of Search".[13][14] Lanzone has also been credited by search engine expert Danny Sullivan for popularizing the search engine trend of going beyond "10 blue links," instead "providing direct answers and new ways to interact with search results," later adopted by Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.[15]
During his time leading digital at CBS, Lanzone was best known for driving the development of the company's numerous streaming services,[16] including the 2014 launch of CBS All Access, home to original shows such as Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, The Good Fight and Jordan Peele's reboot of The Twilight Zone.[17] Lanzone's tenure as CEO also saw the development of the streaming services CBSN, CBS Sports HQ, ET Live (Entertainment Tonight), and several local versions of CBSN.[18] CBS Interactive grew from approximately 70 million monthly unique users to more than 190 million monthly unique users in the United States during that time.[19] In 2016, Lanzone was named by Leslie Moonves as the first chief digital officer in the history of CBS Corporation.[20]
Lanzone departed ViacomCBS in December 2019, moving to Benchmark Capital to become executive-in-residence. On July 27, 2020, Match Group announced that it had appointed Lanzone as the new CEO of Tinder.[21] On September 10, 2021, he was announced as the new CEO of Yahoo, after the company was sold by Verizon to Apollo Global Management.[22]
