Scott Hassan

Last updated

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, a company which 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]

Related Research Articles

<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 businessman (born 1973)

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is an American businessman and computer scientist who co-founded Google with Larry Page. He 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 June 2024, Brin is the 7th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $146 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and Forbes.

robots.txt Internet protocol

robots.txt is the filename used for implementing the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a standard used by websites to indicate to visiting web crawlers and other web robots which portions of the website they are allowed to visit.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric Schmidt</span> American businessman and software engineer (born 1955)

Eric Emerson Schmidt is an American businessman and former software engineer who served as the CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011 and as the company's executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also served as the executive chairman of parent company Alphabet Inc. from 2015 to 2017, and Technical Advisor at Alphabet from 2017 to 2020. In April 2022, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimated his net worth to be US$25.1 billion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Excite (web portal)</span> Internet portal

Excite is an American website operated by IAC that provides outsourced internet content such as a metasearch engine, with outsourced weather and news content on the main page. As of 2024, all of Excite's operations are controlled by services outside of the business.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Webvan</span> Bankrupt technology company

Webvan was a dot-com company and grocery business that filed for bankruptcy in 2001 after 3 years of operation. It was headquartered in Foster City, California, United States. It delivered products to customers' homes within a 30-minute window of their choosing. At its peak, it offered service in ten US areas: the San Francisco Bay Area; Dallas; Sacramento; San Diego; Los Angeles; Orange County, California; Chicago; Seattle; Portland, Oregon; and Atlanta, Georgia. The company had hoped to expand to 26 cities by 2001.

eGroups Former email list management website

eGroups.com was an email list management website. The site allowed users to create their own mailing lists and sign up for membership. The website provided archives of the messages as well as list management functionality. Each group also had a shared calendar, file space, group chat, and a simple way to communicate. eGroups was bought in August 2000 by Yahoo! and became a part of Yahoo! Groups, which as of the end of 2019 were under Verizon ownership.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google</span> American multinational technology company

Google LLC is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial intelligence (AI). It has been referred to as "the most powerful company in the world" and is one of the world's most valuable brands due to its market dominance, data collection, and technological advantages in the field of AI. Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., is one of the five Big Tech companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

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">Ma Huateng</span> Chinese business magnate (born 1971)

Ma Huateng is a Chinese business magnate, investor, politician, and philanthropist. He is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tencent, one of the most valuable companies in East Asia, one of the largest internet and technology companies, and one of the biggest investment, gaming, and entertainment conglomerates in the world. The company in Shenzhen develops China's biggest mobile instant messaging service, WeChat, and its subsidiaries provide media, entertainment, payment systems, smartphones, internet-related services, value-added services and online advertising services, both in China and globally.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Sullivan (technologist)</span> American technologist and journalist

Danny Sullivan is an American technologist, journalist, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Search Engine Watch in 1997, one of the earliest online publications about search engine marketing. He also launched Search Engine Strategies, one of the earliest search marketing trade shows. After selling both companies in 2006, he co-founded Search Engine Land, another search marketing publication. In 2017, he joined Google as an adviser at the search division of the company.

<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 became 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.

Timothy Lee Blixseth is an American real estate developer, record producer, songwriter and timber baron. He was a co-founder of the Yellowstone Club in Montana. In 2006, Blixseth was featured in the Forbes 400 List of wealthiest Americans with a net worth of $1.3 billion. However, based on court records from his 2009 divorce, news reports estimated his 2011 net worth to have dropped to $200 million. By 2012, he faced a forced bankruptcy for failing to pay the state of Montana $57 million in income taxes and in 2014 he told the courts he was "too poor" to pay pending judgments and contempt findings for his fraud role in the Yellowstone Club bankruptcy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alphabet Inc.</span> American multinational technology conglomerate

Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's second-largest technology company by revenue and one of the world's most valuable companies. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Levandowski</span> French-American automobile engineer (born 1980)

Anthony Levandowski is a French-American self-driving car engineer. In 2009, Levandowski co-founded Google's self-driving car program, now known as Waymo, and was a technical lead until 2016. In 2016, he co-founded and sold Otto, an autonomous trucking company, to Uber Technologies. In 2018, he co-founded the autonomous trucking company Pronto; the first self-driving technology company to complete a cross-country drive in an autonomous vehicle in October 2018. At the 2019 AV Summit hosted by The Information, Levandowski remarked that a fundamental breakthrough in artificial intelligence is needed to move autonomous vehicle technology forward.

The 2018 Google walkouts occurred on November 1, 2018 at approximately 11 am. The walkout had a large number of participants. The employees demanded five concrete changes from the company: an end to forced arbitration; a commitment to end pay inequality; a transparent sexual harassment report; an inclusive process for reporting sexual misconduct; and elevate the Chief of Diversity to answer directly to the CEO and create an Employee Representative. A majority of the known organizers have left the company since the walkout and many continue to voice their concerns. Google agreed to end forced arbitration and create a private report of sexual assault, but has not provided any further details about the other demands.

<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. 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.
  4. Company Filing, SEC.gov
  5. Acquisition Enhances Powerful Communication Tools for Consumers Archived 2007-06-09 at the Wayback Machine
  6. "Willow Garage Founder Scott Hassan Aims To Build A Startup Village". IEEE Spectrum . 5 September 2014. Retrieved 1 September 2019.
  7. 1 2 D'Onfro, Jillian (February 13, 2016). "How a billionaire who wrote Google's original code created a robot revolution". Business Insider .
  8. D'Onfro, Jillian (28 February 2020). "A Dramatic Legal Battle Between A Wealthy Robotics Founder And His Wife Takes New Twist: Bankruptcy". Forbes .