Michael Yavonditte

Michael Yavonditte is a serial ad-tech entrepreneur and prolific angel investor based in New York City. He began his career in the 1990s at Ziff-Davis/ZDNet in New York, holding sales and management roles, before joining the pioneering free ISP Juno Online Services in 1997 as a business-development director, rising to vice president by 1998, where he negotiated large advertising and e-commerce agreements. In 2000 he moved to AltaVista (then owned by CMGI), managing large advertiser partnerships and helping shape early relevancy-based search monetization, including the "Trusted Feed" program. He holds a degree in Business and Political Science from Pace University in New York.

Yavonditte is best known as the CEO of Quigo Technologies, a semantic advertising network that built a direct competitor to Google's AdSense and signed premium publishers such as CNN, Fox News, ESPN, and Time Inc. Quigo was acquired by AOL in 2007 for a reported ~$340 million, one of the notable ad-tech exits of that era. After Quigo, he founded the social/contact-sharing startup Hashable and became an active angel investor in the New York tech scene.

In 2012 he co-founded Yieldmo, a mobile-first advertising platform focused on attention-optimized creative formats (including its patented "hyperscroller" and scroll-based video formats), curation, and measurement. He continues to serve as Yieldmo's Founder, CEO, and Board Member. Alongside his operating role, he has personally backed 100+ internet companies, making him one of the more active individual angels in the NYC ecosystem.

• Invests as an individual angel at the seed / early stage, frequently syndicating alongside established venture firms (Accel, Expa, Bullpen Capital, Female Founders Fund, and angels such as Joanne Wilson).
• Deep affinity for ad tech, digital media, marketplaces, consumer internet, and data/analytics — sectors mirroring his operating experience at Quigo, AltaVista, and Yieldmo.
• Backs founders taking on entrenched incumbents; his own reputation (per Mark Suster's "The Guy Who Took on Google") is built on competing head-to-head with much larger players like Google's AdSense.
• Describes himself as a "private investor in the technology industry" who provides "insights and capital to new and emerging entrepreneurs" — bringing operator-level pattern recognition in advertising, monetization, and scaling.