Mike Cassidy (entrepreneur)

He was CEO and co-founder of five Internet start-ups, including Stylus Innovation, Direct Hit, Xfire, Ruba.com,[1] and Apollo Fusion.

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.

[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.

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.

[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.