VMWare

Founded by married couple Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum, along with Scott Devine, Edward Wang, and Edouard Bugnion in 1998, VMWare provides virtualization software.

Diane graduated from MIT and met Rosenblum while he was pursuing his Ph.D from University of California, Berkeley. The couple along with the other co-founders developed a range of products, most notably the hypervisors. With its headquarters in Palo Alto, the company operated in a stealth mode throughout 1998 with barely 20 employees. It was officially launched in February 1999 at the DEMO Conference. VMWare was acquired by EMC in 2004 and now operates as a separate software subsidiary. In 2007, EMC released 10 percent of its shares in the company in an IPO.

In July 2008, Diane was fired by the Board of Directors and was replaced by Paul Maritz who was heading EMC’s cloud computing business. In September 2008, Rosenblum also resigned as the Chief Strategist.