Mike Yavonditte can point to several reasons his company Quigo became an acquisition target. He says the ad-targeting company, which sold to AOL for $340 million in 2007, built good products and a top-notch team. But it really came down to being innovative. “We built a better mousetrap than our competitors,” he says. “When you do that you get rewarded.” Yavonditte joined the company as CEO when it was pre-revenue and pre-product and had only four employees, none of whom were located in the U.S. where he lived.
Before joining Quigo he worked in sales, business development and strategy at AltaVista and USA Networks. He was approached by Quigo founders Yaron Galai and Oded Itzhak during their search for a CEO, and spent almost six years after he joined building the team and occasionally turning down acquisition offers (according to a BusinessInsider article, he turned down offers from Fox Interactive Media and Overture Media before accepting AOL’s deal). He says the acquisition process was full of surprises. “The surprises about the M&A process were too numerous to cover,” he says. ”People behaving poorly,” was one, and the fact that it “took a really long time.” He says he was also surprised that Yahoo! wasn’t the one to acquire the company.
Now he’s on to a different business idea, one that is being called the “Mint.com for social capital.” He describes the company, Hashable, as “the first professional networking service that’s fun to use and built for mobile.” The idea didn’t start as a networking service though. “A group of teammates came together to develop the idea. We were working on something else but decided to switch gears. Glad we did.” The service launched in private beta in July 2010, and announced a $4 million round of funding led by Union Square Ventures in November.
Hashable helps people track their offline interactions online. Using the iPhone application and integration with services including Twitter, users can make introductions, add people to their network using hashtags, and see who they interact with the most in their network. It also keeps track of a dynamic ‘relationship book’ outlining everyone you meet. The company is often compared to another professional networking tool, LinkedIn. “LinkedIn is a great company. Hashable is a promising company. We don’t deserve to yet be compared. We are building a very different data set. Hashable is the kind of site one that use everyday,” Yavonditte says. Right now they’re focused on listening carefully to users and building out their feature set.
After years of gaining experience as an entrepreneur, Yavonditte is helping to support the next generation of innovative entrepreneurs. “Personally, I continue to invest in a lot of tech companies,” he says. He’s currently an investor in event site Meetup, online influence site Klout, and daily deal aggregator Yipit, among others. But for any company who doesn’t receive investment from Yavonditte, they can still benefit from his advice for new entrepreneurs. “Be introspective, always know your problems, and always be trying to fix the worst one. Hire great people to help you.”
Despite the fact that Yavonditte has been at the helm of startup companies, he says he doesn’t think of himself as an entrepreneur. “Am I an entrepreneur? I don’t think of myself in that way. I’m an Internet person.” The companies he’s invested in, as well as his team at Hashable, would likely disagree.
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