Entrepreneurs Who Turned Research into Useful Technology

Digital Equipment Corporation. Olsen was an engineer at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on the Whirlwind and TX-0 transistor computers. In 1957 he and Harlan Anderson left to found DEC, and its PDP minicomputers brought interactive computing out of military labs and into university departments and factories at a fraction of mainframe prices. He was slow to take personal computers seriously and was pushed out in 1992. He died in 2011.

Integrated circuits. At Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959 Noyce worked out how to build a whole circuit on one piece of silicon, using Jean Hoerni's planar process; Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments reached a similar idea months earlier. In 1968 he co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore, turning chip research into a company that kept doing its own. He died in 1990.

Bose. An MIT electrical engineering professor, Bose was disappointed by an expensive hi-fi and began studying how people actually hear sound in a room. He founded the Bose Corporation in 1964 to turn that psychoacoustic research into speakers, and the company later pioneered noise-cancelling headphones. He kept teaching at MIT for decades and in 2011 gave the university most of the company's shares. He died in 2013.

Viterbi algorithm, Linkabit and Qualcomm. As a UCLA academic in 1967 Viterbi devised the decoding method that bears his name, now used in satellite links, mobile phones and speech recognition, and chose not to patent it. He co-founded the consultancy Linkabit with Irwin Jacobs and Leonard Kleinrock in 1968, and Qualcomm with Jacobs and others in 1985, where his theory helped make digital mobile networks work.

Qualcomm. Jacobs taught communications theory at MIT and the University of California, San Diego, and co-wrote a standard textbook on it before co-founding Linkabit and then, in 1985, Qualcomm. He pushed code-division multiple access, a technique from military radio research, into commercial mobile networks against heavy industry scepticism. Qualcomm's model of licensing its patents to phone makers made it hugely profitable and drew repeated competition cases.

Ethernet and 3Com. At Xerox PARC in 1973 Metcalfe and David Boggs designed Ethernet to link the lab's experimental computers and printers. Xerox did little with it, so in 1979 Metcalfe founded 3Com to sell network cards, and persuaded Digital, Intel and Xerox to publish Ethernet as an open standard that any maker could build to. That openness is why it still wires offices today. He received the Turing Award for it.

Relational databases. At Berkeley Stonebraker led Ingres in the 1970s and Postgres in the 1980s, academic prototypes whose freely available code seeded a generation of database products, PostgreSQL among them. He has repeatedly turned his research into companies, including Ingres, Illustra, Vertica, VoltDB and Tamr, each built to test a new idea about storing data. He received the Turing Award in 2014.

Silicon Graphics. As a Stanford associate professor Clark designed the Geometry Engine with his students, a chip that did the heavy maths of three-dimensional graphics in hardware. In 1982 he left with several of those students to found Silicon Graphics, whose workstations rendered film effects and flight simulators. He later co-founded Netscape with Marc Andreessen, a commercial rather than research venture.

Sun Microsystems. As a Stanford graduate student Bechtolsheim designed the SUN workstation board for the university network, and Stanford licensed the design to several companies. When none made much of it he co-founded Sun in 1982 with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Bill Joy, selling networked Unix workstations built from standard parts. He later wrote the first cheque to Google and co-founded Arista Networks.

MATLAB and MathWorks. Moler helped write the LINPACK and EISPACK numerical libraries and in the late 1970s created MATLAB so his students at the University of New Mexico could use them without writing Fortran. The engineer Jack Little saw its value, rewrote it in C, and in 1984 the two founded MathWorks with Steve Bangert. MATLAB became standard in engineering teaching and industry. Moler died in May 2026.

Cisco. Bosack ran computers for Stanford's computer science department when he and Sandy Lerner, who ran the business school's, worked on linking the university's separate networks. The multi-protocol router software that did it was largely written by Stanford engineer William Yeager, and Stanford licensed it to the couple's new company, Cisco, in 1987. Cisco's routers then helped build the commercial internet. Bosack left in 1990.

Cisco. Lerner co-founded Cisco with Leonard Bosack in 1984, running the early business from their home and handling customers while Stanford's networking work was licensed in. She was forced out in 1990, shortly after the company went public, and Bosack left with her. She spent much of her share on animal welfare and on Chawton House in Hampshire, a library of early women's writing.

MIPS. Hennessy led Stanford's MIPS project from 1981, showing that a processor with a small set of simple instructions could outrun more complex designs, the RISC idea David Patterson was pursuing at Berkeley. In 1984 he co-founded MIPS Computer Systems to sell it, and MIPS chips went into workstations, game consoles and routers. He later ran Stanford as president and chairs Alphabet's board.

Mathematica. A physicist who built his own algebra system, SMP, at Caltech, Wolfram fell out with the institute over who owned it and resigned. He then founded Wolfram Research in 1987 and released Mathematica in 1988, a single environment for symbolic maths, numerics and graphics that became a fixture in universities and research labs. Wolfram Alpha followed in 2009. He still runs the company.

Plastic electronics. At Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in 1989 Friend's group, with Jeremy Burroughes and Donal Bradley, found that a conjugated polymer could emit light. He co-founded Cambridge Display Technology in 1992 to license polymer light-emitting displays, and Plastic Logic in 2000 with Henning Sirringhaus to make flexible electronics. Both showed how hard and slow the path from a Cambridge laboratory to a factory can be.

CMOS image sensors. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the early 1990s Fossum led the team that developed the CMOS active-pixel sensor, a camera chip that could be made cheaply on ordinary chip production lines. JPL licensed it, and in 1995 he co-founded Photobit with Sabrina Kemeny and colleagues to commercialise it; Micron bought the company in 2001. Almost every phone camera now uses the approach. He teaches at Dartmouth.

Autonomy and Darktrace. Lynch's Cambridge doctoral research applied Bayesian statistics to pattern recognition, and he used it to found Autonomy in 1996, software that could make sense of unstructured documents, email and audio. Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2011 and soon accused him of inflating its value; he lost the English civil case but was acquitted of all criminal charges in the United States in 2024. He died weeks later when his yacht sank off Sicily.

Google. As a Stanford PhD student Page developed PageRank with Sergey Brin, ranking web pages by the links pointing to them, in a research project first called BackRub. Stanford held the patent and licensed it exclusively to Google, founded in 1998, in exchange for shares. Page ran Google twice and then its parent Alphabet until 2019, and with Brin still controls the company through its voting shares.

Google. Brin, a fellow Stanford PhD student, worked with Larry Page on the data-mining and crawling side of the research that became PageRank and the Google search engine, and they co-authored the 1998 paper describing it. He co-founded Google that year, later led its experimental projects, and stepped back from Alphabet's management in 2019. He has since returned to hands-on work on Google's Gemini AI models.

Solexa. In Cambridge's chemistry department in 1997 Balasubramanian and David Klenerman worked out sequencing by synthesis, reading DNA by watching fluorescent bases join millions of strands in parallel. They founded Solexa in 1998 to develop it, combining it with Pascal Mayer's cluster amplification method, and Illumina bought the company in 2007. The approach cut the cost of sequencing a human genome from millions of pounds to a few hundred.

Solexa. A Cambridge biophysical chemist who specialises in watching single molecules with lasers, Klenerman brought the optical side to the sequencing method he invented with Shankar Balasubramanian, and co-founded Solexa with him in 1998. He stayed an academic while the company developed it into the instruments Illumina now sells. The two shared the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Pascal Mayer in 2022.

Quantenna and Plume. A Stanford researcher on the limits of wireless networks, Goldsmith co-founded Quantenna Communications in 2006 and served as its chief technology officer, turning multiple-antenna research into Wi-Fi chips that could stream video reliably around a home. She later co-founded Plume, whose software manages home Wi-Fi from the cloud. She became president of Stony Brook University in 2025.

DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs. After a neuroscience doctorate at University College London, Hassabis founded DeepMind in London in 2010 with Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, and sold it to Google in 2014. Its AlphaFold system, led with John Jumper, predicted the shapes of almost every known protein and was released free to scientists, earning the pair the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He now runs Isomorphic Labs, which applies the work to drug discovery, alongside his senior roles at Google.

DNNresearch. Hinton spent decades on neural networks when most researchers had given up on them. In 2012 his Toronto students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever built AlexNet, which won an image-recognition contest by a wide margin, and the three formed DNNresearch, a company with no product that Google bought after an auction. He worked at Google until 2023, then left to speak freely about the risks of AI. He shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics.