Bill Gross was a genius out of Caltech. When we met Bill, he explained how he was going to create the search tool for commerce. We were so impressed with his idea that we agreed to fund him. The idea was a search engine called GoTo with bidded listings. Bill changed the face of internet advertising forever. The genius was that advertisers would pay for search terms. GoTo would charge different prices for different terms based on demand. This was the beginning of paid search. Before Bill, no search engine had any profitable business model. This innovation became instrumental to the success of Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, and all the other paid search engines. GoTo later rebranded as Overture and acquired other search engines. In 2003, Yahoo bought Overture for $1.6 billion. The worldwide paid search industry is now estimated to be over $300 billion. Paid search is common sense now. Back then, it was a stroke of genius from Bill.