Scott Hassan is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur who was the main programmer of the original Google Search engine, then known as BackRub. He was research assistant at Stanford University at the time, after working at Washington University's Medical Libraries Group (having been recruited out of SUNY Buffalo for the summer). Hassan left before Google was officially founded as a company.[1][2] He bought 160,000 Google shares for $800 when the company was founded in 1998, which would be valued at more than $200 million when Google went public in 2004, and more than $13 billion as of 2021.[3]
In 1997 Hassan founded FindMail, later renamed to eGroups.com, an email list management web site. He owned 5.7% of eGroups in March 2000 when the company filed a Form S-1. eGroups was later bought by Yahoo! for $432m in August 2000 in a stock deal and became Yahoo! Groups.[4][5]
In 2006 Hassan started Willow Garage, a robotics research lab and technology incubator. The organization created the open source robotics software suite ROS (Robot Operating System). Willow Garage shut down in early 2014.[6][7]
In 2011 Scott spun off Suitable Technologies from Willow Garage. The new company made a video-conferencing robot which saw use by figures such as Edward Snowden and President Barack Obama. Suitable failed to become profitable and filed for bankruptcy in 2020, having lost $50 million between 2013 and 2018.[7][8]
- ^ Fisher, Adam (July 10, 2018). "Brin, Page, and Mayer on the Accidental Birth of the Company that Changed Everything". Vanity Fair. Retrieved 23 August 2019.
- ^ McHugh, Josh (1 January 2003). "Google vs. Evil". Wired. Retrieved 24 August 2019.
- ^ Wakabayashi, Daisuke (20 August 2021). "Who Gets the L.L.C.? Inside a Silicon Valley Billionaire's Divorce". New York Times. Retrieved 5 June 2022.
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google's parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today.
- ^ Company Filing, SEC.gov
- ^ Acquisition Enhances Powerful Communication Tools for Consumers Archived 2007-06-09 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Willow Garage Founder Scott Hassan Aims To Build A Startup Village". IEEE Spectrum. 5 September 2014. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
- ^ a b D'Onfro, Jillian (February 13, 2016). "How a billionaire who wrote Google's original code created a robot revolution". Business Insider.
- ^ D'Onfro, Jillian (28 February 2020). "A Dramatic Legal Battle Between A Wealthy Robotics Founder And His Wife Takes New Twist: Bankruptcy". Forbes.