About Hug
We are a small team building web products focused on energy conservation.
If you would like to drop us a line check out our contact page.
The Team
Marcus Tallhamn, CEO
Marcus was previously President at Prover Technology, a private company funded by Intel Capital, Synopsys, and others. At Prover he launched several successful software products for engineering safety critical embedded systems. Today, the tools are widely deployed in more than 25 countries, and used by companies like Airbus, General Electric, and New York City Transit.
Marcus studied engineering physics at Chalmers in Sweden, and spent a couple of years working in France with verification software for the Airbus A380 before he moved to Silicon Valley in 2001. In his nonexistent spare time, Marcus likes flying planes, playing golf and taking photos.
Sean Plaice, Product
Sean brings more than 10 years of operations and entrepreneurial experience to the team. He was most recently director of systems operations at Ruba, a company started by Mike Cassidy and funded by Benchmark and DFJ. Prior to that he managed operations at Yelp, co-founded and bootstrapped Host Collective to 40000 paying customers, and ran the west coast systems operations team for Affinity Internet - one of the top 10 largest hosting services companies in the United States.
Sean Plaice is a native Californian, you can see what he is up to at plaice.org.
Matt Olson, Engineering
Matt Olson brings 14 years of web application development experience to Hug Energy. He specializes in building scalable, high concurrency, database driven web applications. Prior to Hug, Matt's worked with companies like Pixar, National Geographic, Ticketweb, iXL, and others. Matt has a Bachelor's in Computer Science and Physics from U.C. Berkeley.
Matt is an avid cyclist and, when not working on software, enjoys bicycle touring. He's looking forward to a cross country trip one day.
Brad Schumitsch, Engineering
Prior to Hug, Brad Schumitsch engineered CTR and conversion rate prediction algorithms at AdMob (acquired by Google for $750M). Prior to that he architected and prototyped ad-delivery at BigTent. Brad graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence, part of which was carried out at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin as a Fulbright Scholar.
Brad is originally from Wisconsin, he enjoys hard puzzles and plays league soccer.
Our Advisors
Mike Cassidy
Mike Cassidy is a serial entrepreneur. He was CEO and Co-founder of Ruba (acquired by Google), Xfire (acquired by MTV for $110 million), Direct Hit (acquired by Ask Jeeves for $500 million), and Stylus Innovation (acquired by Artisoft for $13 million).
Paul Blomdahl
Paul Blomdahl co-founded TAT, mobile software company. The company has had 6000% revenue growth from 2003-2008, which landed it on the 11th place EMEA's Fast 500 list.