VMware

The founder

Diane Greene co-founded VMware in 1998 with her husband Mendel Rosenblum, a Stanford professor whose research provided the technical foundation, along with colleagues Edouard Bugnion, Scott Devine and Edward Wang. As founding CEO, she built VMware into the company that commercialized and popularized x86 virtualization, reshaping enterprise data centers. EMC acquired VMware in early 2004 but ran it as a separate, majority-owned subsidiary with Greene remaining CEO. She was removed as CEO in 2008 amid disagreements with EMC’s leadership, later joined Google’s board, and led Google Cloud from 2015–2019.

How it was sold

EMC acquired privately held VMware in an all-cash deal announced December 15, 2003 and closed in January 2004, then kept it operating as a distinct subsidiary rather than folding it into EMC’s core storage business — a structure widely credited with letting VMware’s virtualization business flourish and eventually go public itself in 2007.