07-24-2026MY FIRST JOB

From pizza joint bus boy to Yahoo CEO: Jim Lanzone on how to do hard things and not to be afraid of them

“My dad was a lawyer. My mom was a teacher. My paternal grandparents had a fish and chips store in Harlem. There was no basis in our family to understand business.”

[Source photos: Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for The MAKERS Conference; Carmen K Sisson; Adobe Stock]

I had a lot of odd jobs growing up. I was a bus boy at a pizza place in college; I worked at a bookstore; I was a clerk at a bankruptcy law firm; and I did cold calls for Smith Barney (now Morgan Stanley) trying to get people to buy bonds. I even worked as an English tutor in Barcelona for a little while after I graduated from college. And then, I did what a lot of people........

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