Scott Hassan

Last updated

Scott Hassan is a 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]

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. [3] [4]

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. [5] [6]

Personal life

Hassan married consultant and web developer Allison Huynh in 2001. She had emigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. They met through mutual friends at Stanford and had three children. In 2014, Hassan informed Allison of his intention to divorce her. Disagreements over the division of their assets were taken to trial in 2021. Before the trial, Hassan admitted to having started a website in Huynh's name containing "embarrassing information from her past". [7] [8] [9]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silicon Valley</span> Technology hub in California, United States

Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley. The term "Silicon Valley" refers to the area in which high-tech business has proliferated in Northern California, and it also serves as a general metonym for California's high-tech business sector.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Page</span> American computer scientist and businessman (born 1973)

Lawrence Edward Page is an American businessman, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sergey Brin</span> American billionaire businessman (born 1973)

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is an American businessman best known for co-founding Google with Larry Page. Brin was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders, and board members. As of March 2024, Brin is the 10th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $119 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James H. Clark</span> American computer scientist and entrepreneur

James Henry Clark is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in computer graphics led to the development of systems for the fast rendering of three-dimensional computer images.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerry Yang</span> Computer programmer and co-founder of Yahoo!

Jerry Chih-Yuan Yang is a Taiwanese-American billionaire computer programmer, internet entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo! Inc. and founding partner of AME Cloud Ventures.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vinod Khosla</span> Indian-American businessman (born 1955)

Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marc Andreessen</span> American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer (born 1971)

Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and former software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites and an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net-worth is estimated at $1.7 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Larry Tesler</span> American computer scientist (1945–2020)

Lawrence Gordon Tesler was an American computer scientist who worked in the field of human–computer interaction. Tesler worked at Xerox PARC, Apple, Amazon, and Yahoo!.

David Ross Cheriton is a Canadian computer scientist, businessman, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. He is a computer science professor at Stanford University, where he founded and leads the Distributed Systems Group.

Google was officially launched in 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to market Google Search, which has become the most used web-based search engine. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students at Stanford University in California, developed a search algorithm first (1996) known as "BackRub", with the help of Scott Hassan and Alan Steremberg. The search engine soon proved successful and the expanding company moved several times, finally settling at Mountain View in 2003. This marked a phase of rapid growth, with the company making its initial public offering in 2004 and quickly becoming one of the world's largest media companies. The company launched Google News in 2002, Gmail in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Google Chrome in 2008, and the social network known as Google+ in 2011, in addition to many other products. In 2015, Google became the main subsidiary of the holding company Alphabet Inc.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marissa Mayer</span> American business executive and engineer, former CEO of Yahoo!

Marissa Ann Mayer is an American business executive and investor who served as president and chief executive officer of Yahoo! from 2012 to 2017. She was a long-time executive, usability leader and key spokesperson for Google. Mayer later co-founded Sunshine, a startup technology company.

Boston Dynamics, Inc., is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Boston Dynamics has been owned by the Hyundai Motor Group since December 2020, but having only completed the acquisition in June 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robot Operating System</span> Set of software frameworks for robot software development

Robot Operating System is an open-source robotics middleware suite. Although ROS is not an operating system (OS) but a set of software frameworks for robot software development, it provides services designed for a heterogeneous computer cluster such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. Running sets of ROS-based processes are represented in a graph architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post, and multiplex sensor data, control, state, planning, actuator, and other messages. Despite the importance of reactivity and low latency in robot control, ROS is not a real-time operating system (RTOS). However, it is possible to integrate ROS with real-time computing code. The lack of support for real-time systems has been addressed in the creation of ROS 2, a major revision of the ROS API which will take advantage of modern libraries and technologies for core ROS functions and add support for real-time code and embedded system hardware.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Willow Garage</span> Robotics research and development company

Willow Garage was a robotics research lab and technology incubator devoted to developing hardware and open source software for personal robotics applications. The company was best known for its open source software suite Robot Operating System (ROS), which rapidly become a common, standard tool among robotics researchers upon its initial release in 2010. It was begun in late 2006 by Scott Hassan, who had worked with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to develop the technology that became the Google Search engine. Steve Cousins was the president and CEO. Willow Garage was located in Menlo Park, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Ng</span> American artificial intelligence researcher

Andrew Yan-Tak Ng is a British-American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Ng was a cofounder and head of Google Brain and was the former Chief Scientist at Baidu, building the company's Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people.

Meka Robotics was a San Francisco–based company that made robotic systems.

<i>Silicon Valley</i> (TV series) 2014–2019 American television series

Silicon Valley is an American comedy television series created by Mike Judge, John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky. It premiered on HBO on April 6, 2014, and concluded on December 8, 2019, running for six seasons for a total of 53 episodes. Parodying the culture of the technology industry in Silicon Valley, the series focuses on Richard Hendricks, a programmer who founds a startup company called Pied Piper, and chronicles his struggles to maintain his company while facing competition from larger entities. Co-stars include T.J. Miller, Josh Brener, Martin Starr, Kumail Nanjiani, Zach Woods, Amanda Crew, Matt Ross, and Jimmy O. Yang.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Holmes</span> American businesswoman (born 1984)

Elizabeth Anne Holmes is an American biotechnology entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud in connection to her blood-testing company, Theranos. The company's valuation soared after it claimed to have revolutionized blood testing by developing methods that needed only very small volumes of blood, such as from a fingerprick. In 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States on the basis of a $9-billion valuation of her company. In the following year, as revelations of fraud about Theranos's claims began to surface, Forbes revised its estimate of Holmes's net worth to zero, and Fortune named her in its feature article on "The World's 19 Most Disappointing Leaders".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leila Takayama</span> Human–computer interaction specialist

Leila A. Takayama is an associate professor of Human–computer interaction at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has previously held positions at Google X and Willow Garage. She was elected as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2013.

Open Robotics is a nonprofit corporation headquartered in Mountain View, California. It is the primary maintainer of the Robot Operating System, and the Gazebo simulator. Its stated mission is to support "the development, distribution and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development".

References

  1. 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.
  2. McHugh, Josh (1 January 2003). "Google vs. Evil". Wired . Retrieved 24 August 2019.
  3. Company Filing, SEC.gov
  4. Acquisition Enhances Powerful Communication Tools for Consumers Archived 2007-06-09 at the Wayback Machine
  5. "Willow Garage Founder Scott Hassan Aims To Build A Startup Village". IEEE Spectrum . 5 September 2014. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  6. D'Onfro, Jillian (February 13, 2016). "How a billionaire who wrote Google's original code created a robot revolution". Business Insider .
  7. Wakabayashi, Daisuke. "Who Gets the L.L.C.? Inside a Silicon Valley Billionaire's Divorce". New York Times. Retrieved 5 June 2022.
  8. "Silicon Valley Billionaire's Divorce Makes Headlines". NBC Bay Area. 23 August 2021. Retrieved 27 December 2022.
  9. Goddard, Jacqui (24 August 2021). "Google guru created site to shame wife in divorce battle" . Retrieved 27 December 2022.