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Michael "Fuzzy" Mauldin

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THEN: Lycos Founder (1994)
NOW: Cattle Rancher and Robot Enthusiast

In 1994 while at Carnegie Mellon, Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin used three pages of code to create the Internet search engine Lycos. A year later, CMGI purchased the rights to Lycos, building it up to a publicly traded, successful company.

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Mauldin left Lycos in 1997 to co-found Conversive (formerly Virtual Personalities, Inc.), a company that creates self-animated computer generated human characters. In 2000, he was watching TV and happened to catch an episode of “Battle Bots.” Six weeks later, he had his first robot ready for competition (he and his family, known as “Team Toad,” reached the quarterfinals three times in two years).

Mauldin now lives in Austin, Texas with his wife on their 81-acre ranch, where they raise cattle. And now that they are empty nesters, he and his wife plan to spend the next two years traveling in an RV.

“I am such a dinosaur,” Mauldin said, reflecting on his Lycos days during an interview with SAI. “I never learned Java [Jim Gosling was in the same department at Carnegie Mellon]. I’m working with stone while everyone’s working with metal. For years, Google tried to recruit me,” he laughed. “They finally stopped calling after I put ‘Severely Retired’ on my resume.”

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