He was a research assistant at Stanford’s computer science department, which made him the resident programmer for many doctorate students, when he met Mr. Page, a Ph.D. candidate. He rewrote the code for a slow web crawler that Mr. Page had created to understand the relationship between links on different websites. He also worked with Mr. Brin to build a search engine, which eventually became Google.
When Mr. Page and Mr. Brin founded Google in 1998, Mr. Hassan bought 160,000 shares for $800. When Google went public in 2004, the shares were worth more than $200 million. The shares, now in Google’s parent company, Alphabet, would be valued at more than $13 billion today.
While Mr. Hassan never worked for Google, he was one of the founders of a company called eGroups, which was sold to Yahoo in 2000 for $432 million in stock. He also started two robotics firms.
Mr. Hassan met Ms. Huynh through mutual friends at Stanford in 2000. She had emigrated to the United States from Vietnam after the war and attended Stanford on scholarship. Ms. Huynh said she had dropped out a few years before meeting Mr. Hassan to pursue opportunities during the dot-com boom. She was working as a consultant and web developer, building websites for clients such as Wells Fargo.
In 2001, five days before Christmas, they got married at the Little White Chapel in Las Vegas. There was no discussion of a prenuptial agreement, and they barely discussed finances, both of them said.
Ms. Huynh said she had supported the family financially in the early years. She said Mr. Hassan had $60,000 in debt, so she often paid for food, travel and entertainment — including their engagement party, which Mr. Page and Mr. Brin attended.
Mr. Hassan said that was not true, and that by the time they were married, he was financially secure and debt free. In addition to the Google stock, which was still a speculative investment at the time, he owned a house in San Francisco as well as $8 million in stock of Yahoo — which had lost much of its value after the sale of his company — and Amazon, he said.
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