SAN FRANCISCO: You know all about Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. But there was a third — Scott Hassan, the “almost forgotten cofounder” of Google who is making headlines these days but for all the wrong reasons. Hassan’s wife has taken him to court, alleging that her husband has purposely sold his robotic startup in a “fire sale” amid their ongoing divorce proceedings.
In a complaint filed in Delaware, Allison Huynh said her husband, who is the CEO of Suitable Technologies, has sold key assets of the company to Denmark-based Blue Ocean at the “indefensible” price of $400,000. The complaint says that Suitable should instead “obtain a value in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars”.
The Delaware judge, however, denied a preliminary injunction last week to block Hassan from selling his robotics startup but the fight is still on.
Suitable makes a telepresence robot called ‘Beam’. It is a screen on the wheels that can be moved in a conference room, as if the person speaking via the screen is himself moving. Huynh coowns at least 600,000 shares of Suitable common stock.
Hassan met Page and Brin at Stanford University. He programmed much of the original search engine, but left before Google was officially founded as a company.
