Mike Cassidy (entrepreneur)
Mike Cassidy is a serial entrepreneur, and was CEO and co-founder of three successful Internet start-ups: Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit, and Xfire. Currently, he is CEO and co-founder of social travel start-up Ruba.
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.[1]
His first success, Stylus Innovation, was purportedly started with $500 each from the three initial founders, Cassidy included. The company was later sold to Artisoft for $13 million in 1996. His second effort was early Internet search engine Direct Hit, which was sold to Ask Jeeves for $532.5 million only 500 days after launch in January 2000.[2] Cassidy's next effort was Xfire, a freeware instant messaging service aimed at gamers. Xfire was sold to Viacom on April 25th, 2006 for $102 million.
After a stint working for Benchmark Capital, Mike founded Ruba with Arnaud Weber [3] previously the technical lead for the Chrome browser project at Google.
Cassidy is perhaps best known for his promotion of "speed being the primary business strategy." He has given numerous talks on the subject, and his Slideshare presentation on the subject has received over 16,000 views.[4]
Mike is also the recipient of the DEMO Lifetime Achievement award.[5] DEMO bills itself as the "Launchpad for Emerging Technology."
References
- ^ Notable Biographies, Mike Cassidy.
- ^ VentureBeat, How many times can you bet on this guy?.
- ^ Ruba, Discover your next perfect trip.
- ^ DEMO, Lifetime Acheievement Awards Fall 2009.