Scott Hassan

President & CEO, Suitable Technologies · 1 appearance on the record.

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Hassan was the primary programmer of Google's original search engine and founded eGroups, which sold to Yahoo! for $432 million in 2000. He later founded robotics research lab Willow Garage, which created the Robot Operating System, and spun out Suitable Technologies to build Beam telepresence robots.

5statements → 3claims → 1claims resolved → 4.6/5average certainty → 1.8/5average debate potential →

0 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 3 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 assertions · 1 insight · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 3 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Scott argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

277 words/min while actually speaking · 21.9 um and uh per 1k words · 14.9 false starts per 1k · 32.4% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Scott Hassan: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,010 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said5 Episodes1

Everything Scott Hassan said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Hassan: Learning burden should rest solely on a technology's primary beneficiary

“In a design of our product, my philosophy, Is that you should only put the burden of learning on the person who most benefits from that technology, right? You shouldn't put it on someone who doesn't really benefit from it, right?”

Scott Hassan Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 35:25 a16z Podcast | Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce

Disclosure

Hassan: Suitable Technologies operates a fully automated store with zero physical staff

“At our we have a store on University Ave in Palo Alto right across the street from the Apple store, and it's been, we opened it in October of last year, Halloween, right, was our first day was open, and it's a fully automated store. There are no none of my emp…”

Scott Hassan Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 28:40 a16z Podcast | Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Hassan: Suitable Technologies bans touching Beam devices while someone is logged in

“We have a policy of all employees. Once someone's beamed in, a customer or an employee or anybody beamed in, You're not allowed to touch the beam at all. We want to, we apply the same principles as if they were there. So you don't touch them.”

Scott Hassan Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:54 a16z Podcast | Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce

Assertion Partly supported

Hassan: Beam telepresence robot has zero physical buttons for local users

“And so if you look at the beam product, there are no buttons on it at all. There's no switches. There's no dials. There's nothing to do on your side.”

Scott Hassan Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 36:17 a16z Podcast | Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Hassan: Remote engineers stay logged into Beam for 6 to 8 hours

“We have engineers that sit on the beam for more than six, eight hours. At a time, and they overhear conversations, so they're working from Indiana, from, you know, from Vancouver, all around the world, and they basically are there with their team, embedded wit…”

Scott Hassan Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:46 a16z Podcast | Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
a16z Podcast \| Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce	Jan 2, 2019	9m

Scott Hassan

The record, in short

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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