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]atGoogle 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]
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 EIRatBenchmark 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]
