CEO and co-founder of five startups
Mike is currently the CEO of D-Orbit USA. Mike is also currently the CEO of Vulcan Fusion. Mike has been the Co-Founder and CEO of five start-ups: Apollo Fusion, Ruba, Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation. Apollo Fusion designed and built a type of ion thruster for space propulsion and was acquired by Astra for $150 million. Ruba helped travelers share their favorite places and was acquired by Google. Xfire helps gamers play online with their friends and was acquired by MTV for $110 million. Direct Hit was a revolutionary search engine whose customers included Microsoft, Lycos, AOL, etc., and was acquired by Ask .com for $500 million. Stylus Innovation’s flagship product was computer telephony software Visual Voice. Artisoft acquired Stylus for $13M. Mike was also previously a Vice President at Google and was the Project Leader for 5 years of GoogleX Project Loon (balloon-powered Internet for everyone). Mike has a BS/MS in Aerospace Engineering from MIT. He graduated from Harvard Business School. He studied jazz piano at Berklee College of Music. He has been an advisor to From the Top, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Endeavor.org, and over 300 startup companies. He was selected for the DEMO Lifetime Achievement Award, Berklee College of Music Outstanding Alumni Award, nominated for a Webby award, and named a Forbes E-gang Trendsetter. His startup products have won PC Magazine’s Top 100 Websites, Computer Telephony Product of the Year, CNET Editor’s Choice, PC Magazine’s Editor’s Choice, Via Satellite’s Top 5 Satellite Technologies of the Year, and many other awards.
Project Loon - Project Leader
Project Loon was a moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access. It was a network of balloons traveling on the edge of space, designed to connect people in rural and remote areas, to help fill in coverage gaps and bring people back online after disasters.
Stylus Innovation - CEO and Co-Founder
The first Microsoft based telephony application. Sold to Artisoft for $13 million in 1996.
BYTE Magazine, May 1996
Make Voice Response Sing
“Visual Voice Pro, from Stylus Innovation, employs custom controls, such as VBXes and OCXes, as well as DLLs that you can access from most applications development environments. Visual Voice Pro handles up to 24 calls simultaneously and supports Telephony API (TAPI)-compliant hardware, multi-line voice-response boards, and most fax modems.”
“In another unprecedented move, Direct Hit donated its $30,000 winnings to the other finalists after announcing it had received a commitment for $1.3 million in funding. Making the event even richer, contest alumni/ae Krisztina Holly, John Barrus and Mike Cassidy, whose company Stylus Innovations won the grand prize in the 1991 $10K Competition, returned their original $10,000 award to encourage student entrepreneurship. Artisoft acquired Stylus Innovations in 1996 for $13 million.”
Direct Hit - CEO and Co-Founder
An early search engine. Sold to Ask.com for $532.5 Million.
The Wall Street Journal, January 25, 2000
Ask Jeeves Agrees to Acquire Direct Hit for $532.5 Million
“Ask Jeeves, Inc., Emeryville. Calif., operator of an easy-to-use Internet search engine, said it agreed to buy closely held Direct Hit Technologies, Inc. for $532.5 million in stock, adding technology that will help users search for information ranked by popularity.”
The Washington Post, Sunday, January 24, 1999
Business at Cyberspeed
“When the Web’s first search engines were created, there were few users on the Internet. It wasn’t until the Web popularized the network, and millions of people began adding documents and searching them, that anyone thought much about how computers could collect and analyze data on searching habits.”
Industry Standard, September 25, 1998
The Future of Search Engines
“Net users spend 50 percent of their time online conducting research, according to a recent Business Week/Harris poll, and the portals, no matter how many bells and whistles their sites have, know that a better search engine means more visitors.”
Xfire - CEO and Co-founder
An instant messenger for gamers. Sold to MTV for $110 Million in 2006.
Red Herring, April 24, 2006
Viacom Pays $102M for Xfire
“Online gaming community ties up with media giant for help with advertising to its young, male demographic. Viacom, in a move that amps up the gaming and online community offerings of its MTV Networks, said Monday it was set to pay $102 million for two-and-a-half-year-old startup Xfire. Xfire brings a valuable demographic for advertising revenues, said Viacom. The media giant will integrate its purchase with MTV Networks’ music, entertainment, and networking properties.”
Fortune, February 17, 2006
Is Xfire the next MySpace?
“Xfire, which only launched in January 2004, has three million passionate customers who use its PC software an astonishing average of 88 hours a month, according to Cassidy. More amazing facts: almost 300,000 new users join each month, and for two years the service has sustained a 2 percent-plus growth rate — weekly. Its users — in 100 countries (a slight majority are in the United States) — are online for 200 million minutes every day. The reason for the growth can probably be found in a core philosophy that puts users first.”
Forbes, September 6, 2004
Finding Friends & Foes
“Tens of millions of people play videogames online; the tricky part is finding your friends–and favorite foes–among them. Michael Cassidy can help. His company, Xfire, runs a Web site that is the TV Guide, maÓtre d’ and instant messenger of the gaming world. Cassidy’s service can point you to a buddy who is ready to play the game you want at any moment of the day or night. He already has a lot of friends to prove it. In eight months a million people in 100 countries have downloaded Xfire’s software.”
Ruba - CEO and Co-Founder
A visual travel site and community with a focus on guides, photos, maps and interactive tour listings. Improves the online travel research experience. Sold to Google in 2010.
Google Acquires Travel Guide Startup Ruba
“According to this blog post, Google has acquired online travel guide and community Ruba. Ruba is a visual travel guide & tour review site that provides travelers with visual guides written by other travelers. The blog post is embedded below….”
Apollo Fusion - CEO and Co-Founder
Ion thrusters for satellites. Sold to Astra for $150 million in 2021.
Smallsat launcher Astra has moved to acquire propulsion company Apollo Fusion in a deal valued at up to $145 million. The company is pitching the acquisition as an opportunity to increase its addressable launch market, and deliver spacecraft to orbits beyond Low-Earth Orbit (LEO).
Apollo Fusion offers electric hall engines and has landed a number of contracts recently with York Space Systems, Saturn Satellite Networks’ constellation, Spaceflight’s Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV) Sherpa-LTE, and a U.S. Air Force intelligence satellite.
USA Today - 'Start-up King' Mike Cassidy strikes Silicon Valley gold
By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY
SAN FRANCISCO — Entrepreneurs rarely succeed in Silicon Valley— much less repeat success. … Consider him the Start-up King of Silicon Valley. In short order, he co-founded and was CEO of four [ed. now five] companies — [ed. Apollo Fusion,] Ruba, Xfire, Direct Hit, and Stylus Innovation — that have been sold for more than $600 million. [ed. now $750 million] In a recession-tinged era of few high-tech initial public offerings, where many start-ups fruitlessly seek buyers, the forty-something Cassidy has been able to quickly create and sell companies.
And he's probably not done.
"He's not lucky. He's skilled in finding opportunities and coming up with a solution," says Warren Packard, an investor in Cassidy's second, third, and fourth companies.
Packard has known Cassidy since 1987, when they both worked on a solar race car. They reconnected in 1998, when Cassidy started Direct Hit and Packard was a partner at influential Silicon Valley venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Cassidy approached the firm for funding.
"He had to convince more than me," says Packard, who is still at Draper. "But he was concise, convincing and informal. He moves fast."
Cassidy landed a $3.5 million investment the same day.
