Austin → LA
Free letter today.
Good afternoon, everyone. I’m writing this from San Diego.
Yesterday morning I was in Austin, interviewing Yahoo’s CEO Jim Lanzone at SXSW. Last night, I was at Vanity Fair’s Oscar party. Unfortunately (or fortunately), it was off the record. What I can tell you is that Mark Guiducci has it – he’s doing a fabulous job.
Back to Austin. My relationship with Yahoo started in 2015 when I interned there in college. I’d go to classes at night at FIT and work at Yahoo during the day. It was a formative work experience for me, albeit only one year. When Yahoo’s team reached out to me earlier this year to work with them at SXSW, it was an easy yes. I’ve been curious about their brand renaissance over the last few years – they threw a party with Delia Cai at Night Moves last month, they’ve had a full social media rebrand, and they collaborated with Graza.
Earlier this year, Yahoo launched an AI-powered search called Scout. My first reaction to playing around with it was delight. It feels clicky and friendly, something to play with rather than give tasks to like other AI agents. Last week, they launched something called MyScout, which allows users to create a personalized homepage tailored to their interests, almost like your own Apple News. In a tech landscape where everything feels focused on removing friction and optimizing, Yahoo is building products that make browsing the internet customizable and visually interesting.
I spent the weekend in Austin with the Yahoo team, and was quickly impressed by their CEO, Jim Lanzone. Lanzone’s background is in running media brands like CBS Digital, Tinder, and Ask.com. But something that revealed itself immediately to me was Lanzone’s interest in the world outside of tech. He collects vinyl, is on the board of the Newport Folk Festival, and attended a baseball game in Austin in between brand events at SXSW. During a press breakfast yesterday morning, I asked how he brings his interests outside of the office into the company, and how that influences company culture. He said that he has developed a sort of radar for the people he wants to work at Yahoo, people who value experimentation and trust, and want to build a better internet.
Yahoo is aware that they’re not trying to build a competitor to OpenAI or Anthropic, but I don’t think that should be the bar for success. You can actually build great tools and offer a great product to users without being a $380 billion company.
I didn’t tell the Yahoo team that I was going to do this, but I am offering anyone with an @yahoo.com email address 50% off of Feed Me annual subscriptions this week, here.
Other highlights of my Austin trip included: Lunch with Larry McGuire at Clark’s Oyster Bar, losing my Auralee virginity while shopping at ByGeorge, seeing a fantastic movie that my friends made called “Bagworm”, and a long dinner at Birdie’s with Casey Lewis and Rachel Karten (two of the few people who I can honestly speak about work with).
This week on the Feed Me Job Board: Bumble, Back-House, and Terrain.
The space that Two Boots on Avenue A has occupied for 18 years is available for lease, and it probably comes with 18 years of cornmeal in the floorboards. $22,500/month, which means there’s a good chance whoever grabs it will be bringing $20 martinis to the hood. In a just world, it would become L’Industrie.
New York is getting a new jazz club called The Pocket. The team behind it came from Jazz Standard, Crane Club, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
How Long Gone and Vogue’s podcast The Run Through worked together on a promo trade this week.
The fabulous Harrison Vail posted a photo of the ashtrays used at the Vanity Fair party last night. You can buy your own for $1,045 here.
I interviewed someone with a yahoo email address today, and we talked about it for probably too long. I loved that they positioned it a badge of honor (I.e “like a a 917”) vs a symbol of being out of date. Like ok Shelley love that REFRAME
Wow, that last photo - it's wild that smoking is so thoroughly back.