Mike Cassidy is an American entrepreneur. He was CEO and co-founder of five 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. Cassidy also led Project Loon[3] with Google[x].
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.[4]
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).[5] The company was later sold to Artisoft for $13 million in 1996.[6] 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.[7] 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] Cassidy 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]
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.[11] Cassidy co-founded and served as CEO of Apollo Fusion before the company was acquired by Astra (NASDAQ:ASTR) on June 7, 2021 for $145 million.[12]
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.[13]
Cassidy is the recipient of the DEMO Lifetime Achievement award.[14]