Usually in Silicon Valley, divorces take place quietly, without too much publicity. Not for discretion, but to prevent the fortunes accumulated by the spouses from being made public in the event of a dispute. Hence the breakup of Scott Hassan and Allison Huynh, which ended up in court earlier this week after dragging on for seven years.
Hassan is unknown to most, but without him, writes the New York Times, Google probably would not have existed and would have remained an interesting computer project developed within Stanford University by two students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
In the mid-1990s, Hassan was a full-time research assistant in Stanford’s computer science department and one of his duties was writing code for doctoral students. So it was that he rewrote the code of the program created by Page to understand the relationships between the links of the different websites.
That software “had so many bugs that there was little fun to be had,” Hassan later commented. It took him three months of work to rewrite it. In 1998, when Page and Brin founded Google, they gave Hassan the option to buy some stock in the company, which was not yet publicly traded.
Hassan bought 160,000 Google shares for $ 800. Today, twenty-three years later, those shares are worth more than $ 13 billion: like Nicaragua’s GDP.
Obviously the history of Silicon Valley is full of startups that never took off and people who lost their investments. Hassan’s case is an exception rather than the norm, like the player who wins at slot machines.
But it is also a good synthesis of the madness of the capitalist system, in which an individual can almost accidentally accumulate a stratospheric amount of money and far exceeding his possible earthly needs, while all around thousands of people are sleeping on the street because they have lost your job.
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