Mike Cassidy is an American entrepreneur, and was CEO and co-founder of five previous Internet start-ups including Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit, Xfire, Ruba.com, [1] and Apollo Fusion. In January 2012, he became director of product management and subsequently a Vice President [2] at Google and led Project Loon [3] with Google[x]. In April 2017, it was reported he was working on a clean energy startup, Apollo Fusion, using a hybrid reactor technology based on fusion power. [4]
Cassidy was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BS '85, MS '86 in Aerospace Engineering), Harvard Business School (1991), and studied jazz piano at the Berklee College of Music. [5]
His first success, Stylus Innovation, was started with $500 each from Cassidy and his two co-founders, Krisztina Holly and John Barrus, and subsequently won the MIT 10K (now called the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition). [6] The company was later sold to Artisoft for $13 million in 1996. [7] His second effort was early Internet search engine Direct Hit, sold to Ask Jeeves for $532.5 million in January 2000 only 500 days after launch. Cassidy's next effort was Xfire, a freeware instant messaging service aimed at gamers. Xfire was sold to Viacom on April 25, 2006 for $110 million.
After a stint as an EIR at Benchmark Capital, [8] Mike founded Ruba with Arnaud Weber, [9] who was previously a technical lead for the Chrome browser project at Google. Ruba was acquired by Google in May, 2010. [10]
Most recently, Cassidy co-founded and served as CEO of Apollo Fusion, an electric in-space satellite propulsion company. The company was acquired by Astra (NASDAQ:ASTR) on June 7, 2021 for $145 million. [11]
Cassidy is perhaps best known for promoting "speed as the primary business strategy." He has given numerous talks on the subject, and his Slideshare presentation has received over 75,900 views. [12]
Mike is also the recipient of the DEMO Lifetime Achievement award. [13]
The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) is an electrothermal thruster under development for possible use in spacecraft propulsion. It uses radio waves to ionize and heat an inert propellant, forming a plasma, then a magnetic field to confine and accelerate the expanding plasma, generating thrust. It is a plasma propulsion engine, one of several types of spacecraft electric propulsion systems.
ZF Friedrichshafen AG, also known as ZF Group, originally Zahnradfabrik Friedrichshafen, and commonly abbreviated to ZF, is a global technology company that supplies systems for passenger cars, commercial vehicles and industrial technology. It is headquartered in Friedrichshafen, in the south-west German state of Baden-Württemberg. Specializing in engineering, it is primarily known for its design, research and development, and manufacturing activities in the automotive industry and is one of the largest automotive suppliers in the world. Its products include driveline and chassis technology for cars and commercial vehicles, along with specialist plant equipment such as construction equipment. It is also involved in the rail, marine, defense and aviation industries, as well as general industrial applications. ZF has 168 production locations in 32 countries with approximately 165,000 (2022) employees.
Arthur D. Little is an international management consulting firm originally headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, founded in 1886 and formally incorporated in 1909 by Arthur Dehon Little, an MIT chemist who extended the applications of cellulose acetate, especially its use as artificial silk. Arthur D. Little pioneered the concept of contracted professional services. The company played key roles in the development of business strategy, operations research, the word processor, the first synthetic penicillin, LexisNexis, SABRE, and NASDAQ. Today the company is a multinational management consulting firm operating as a partnership.
Xfire was a proprietary freeware instant messaging service for gamers that also served as a game server browser with various other features. It was available for Microsoft Windows.
Vertical Communications, Inc. is a corporation that specializes in cloud and premises-based private branch exchanges, i.e., business telephone systems. Vertical Communications changed its name on January 1, 2005 from Artisoft, Inc. after acquiring Vertical Networks in September 2004. In September 2005, Vertical Communications acquired Comdial. On December 1, 2006, Vodavi Technology was acquired by Vertical Communications.
Dennis Fong, better known by his online alias Thresh, is an American businessman and retired professional player of the first-person shooter video games Quake and Doom. He is a co-founder of Xfire, an instant messenger and social networking site for gamers, which was acquired by Viacom for US$102 million in April 2006. He also co-founded Lithium Technologies, a social customer relationship management (CRM) company. In his playing career his highest profile victory came in 1997 at the Red Annihilation Quake tournament, where he placed first and won id Software CEO John D. Carmack's Ferrari 328. Fong is recognized by the Guinness World Records as the first professional gamer.
Apollo Hospitals Enterprise Limited is an Indian multinational healthcare group headquartered in Chennai. It is the largest for-profit private hospital network in India, with a network of 71 owned and managed hospitals. Along with the eponymous hospital chain, the company also operates pharmacies, primary care and diagnostic centres, telehealth clinics, and digital healthcare services among others through its subsidiaries.
Arris International Limited is an American telecommunications equipment company engaged in data, video and telephony systems for homes and businesses. On April 4, 2019, Arris was acquired by network infrastructure provider CommScope.
NetObjects, Inc. is a software company founded in 1995 by Samir Arora, David Kleinberg, Clement Mok and Sal Arora. The company is best known for the development of NetObjects Fusion, a web design application for small and medium enterprises with designers who need complete control over page layout and a similar user interface as desktop publishing applications.
Spectris plc is a supplier of precision instrumentation and controls. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Metaweb Technologies, Inc. was a San Francisco–based company that developed Freebase, described as an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". The company was co-founded by Danny Hillis, Veda Hlubinka-Cook and John Giannandrea in 2005.
Apollo Global Management, Inc. is an American private equity firm. It provides investment management and invests in credit, private equity, and real assets. As of 2022, the company had $548 billion of assets under management, including $392 billion invested in credit, including mezzanine capital, hedge funds, non-performing loans, and collateralized loan obligations, $99 billion invested in private equity, and $46.2 billion invested in real assets, which includes real estate and infrastructure. The company invests money on behalf of pension funds, financial endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, as well as other institutional and individual investors.
General Fusion is a Canadian company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is developing a fusion power device based on magnetized target fusion (MTF). The company was founded in 2002 by Dr. Michel Laberge. The company has more than 150 employees in three countries, with additional centers co-located with fusion research laboratories near London, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, US.
Fusion-io, Inc. was a computer hardware and software systems company based in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, that designed and manufactured products using flash memory technology. The Fusion ioMemory was marketed for applications such as databases, virtualization, cloud computing, big data. Their ioDrive product was considered around 2011 to be one of the fastest storage devices on the market.
Veradigm is a publicly traded American company that provides physician practices, hospitals, and other healthcare providers with practice management and electronic health record (EHR) technology. Veradigm also provides products for patient engagement and care coordination, as well as financial and analytics technology. The company has more than 180,000 physician users and has products in 2,700 hospitals and 13,000 extended care organizations. The company formally changed its name from Allscripts to Veradigm in January 2023.
SlideShare is an American hosting service, now owned by Scribd, for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos. Users can upload files privately or publicly in PowerPoint, Word, PDF, or OpenDocument format. Content can then be viewed on the site itself, on mobile devices or embedded on other sites. SlideShare also provides users the ability to rate, comment on, and share the uploaded content. Launched on October 4, 2006, the service positioned itself to be similar to YouTube, but for presentations. The company was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012, and then by Scribd in 2020.
X Development LLC, doing business as X, is an American semi-secret research and development facility and organization founded by Google in January 2010. X has its headquarters about a mile and a half from Alphabet's corporate headquarters, the Googleplex, in Mountain View, California.
Loon LLC was an Alphabet Inc. subsidiary working on providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. The company used high-altitude balloons in the stratosphere at an altitude of 18 km (11 mi) to 25 km (16 mi) to create an aerial wireless network with up to 1 Mbit/s speeds. A reference to the balloons used, Project Loon began as a research and development project by X in 2011, but later spun out into a separate company in July 2018. In January 2021, it was announced that the company would be shut down due to lack of profitability.
Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is a technology executive and entrepreneur. Formerly the president of StubHub, she has worked at various tech and media companies including Google, Amazon and News Corp, Yodlee (YODL), and Polyvore. In 2011, she founded JOYUS, the video shopping platform for women, and served as CEO then Chairman until 2017. Singh Cassidy is also Founder of theBoardlist.
Sakti3, a wholly owned subsidiary of Dyson Ltd., is a solid-state battery company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dyson once stated that it was “committed to investing £1B in battery technology over the coming years, and Sakti3 is an essential and exciting part of that program.” However, Dyson later wrote off much of its investment in Sakti3, indicating that it could no longer be valued at the $93 million price that Dyson had paid. Dyson eventually also cancelled its plans to develop an electric vehicle.