In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon , Hashable founder and CEO Michael Yavonditte delves into the conventional (lack of) wisdom, power plays and power players that helped shape paid search as we know it today. Yavonditte, who sold advertising startup Quigo to AOL for $360 million , started his career running business development at AltaVista . Back then, Yavonditte notes “we used to have more queries than anyone else.” Unfortunately it was during a time, as Dixon points out that “the thought was you cannot monetize search.” Like most other search engines back then, Yavonditte and company got caught up in the trendy portal wars which turned out to be “a great lesson in failure” says Yavonditte.