Cisco's - Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner

Cisco's rise is so emblematic of the whole Silicon Valley phenomenon that it almost approaches allegory. The company was founded in 1984 by the husband-and-wife team of Leonard Bosack and Sandy Lerner, academics who worked at Stanford University. Bosack was a scientist--a somewhat philosophical, nonconfrontational, "big think" kind of scientist--who ran the computers for the Stanford computer science department. Lerner, in most respects his polar opposite--flamboyant, driven, highly confrontational--ran the computer system at the business school. The two computer systems were, of course, unconnected, unable to communicate with each other or with any of the other computer systems scattered around the
Stanford campus.
What the Cisco founders did was devise the means to connect the different networks, thus creating one big Stanford network. Bosack came up with the crucial innovation: a high-speed, relatively inexpensive "router," not a power tool but a device that forwards data packets from one computer site to another. Just as important, its software allowed the packages to be read by any kind of computer on the network. This was something the university badly wanted done--though not necessarily by Bosack et al. It was funding its own large-scale attempt to link the university's computers; the work by the future Cisco founders was largely a skunkworks effort. "We crammed it down Stanford's throat," Lerner says.
Did the founders realize what a bonanza they had? Not remotely. In fact, if Stanford had not refused to give them permission to make some routers for friends at Xerox labs and Hewlett-Packard, it is quite possible they would never have started Cisco. But when Stanford stood in their way, they got so mad that they formed the company and took their new technology with them. Stanford responded by threatening to sue them, which of course only made them madder.
Cisco was the kind of mythical Silicon Valley startup that almost never happens anymore. Bosack and Lerner mortgaged their house for seed capital. They borrowed against their credit cards. Lerner took a job with Schlumberger to support herself and her husband, while working for Cisco in every spare moment. Friends would gather in their living room to build routers and write code.