Ursula Burns grew up in a New York housing project and became the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company when she took over Xerox in 2009.
Lou Gerstner ran IBM from 1993 to 2002, is largely credited with its turnaround, and wrote Who Says Elephants Can't Dance? about the transformation.
John Sculley left the PepsiCo presidency in 1983 to become Apple's CEO, growing sales from $800 million to $8 billion before his 1993 departure.
Dylan Field left Brown University on a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to co-found Figma with Evan Wallace, releasing the web-based design tool in 2016.
Aaron Patzer founded Mint.com, sold to Intuit in 2009, then Fountain.com, sold to Porch.com in 2015, and the health app Vital.
David Packard co-founded Hewlett-Packard with Bill Hewlett in 1939, led it as president, CEO and chairman, and served as US Deputy Secretary of Defense from 1969 to 1971.
Ross Perot left IBM to found Electronic Data Systems in 1962, sold a controlling stake to GM for $2.4 billion in 1984 and ran independent campaigns for president in 1992 and 1996.
Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates, later founded Vulcan Inc. and owned the Seattle Seahawks and Portland Trail Blazers.
Ginni Rometty joined IBM as a systems engineer in 1981 and became its first female CEO in 2012, steering the company toward analytics, cloud and cognitive computing.
Satya Nadella joined Microsoft in 1992, led its shift to cloud computing and succeeded Steve Ballmer as CEO in 2014 and John Thompson as chairman in 2021.
Aaron Levie turned a 2004 USC class project on cloud storage into Box, dropping out in 2005 to launch it as box.net.
Drew Houston co-founded Dropbox in 2007 with MIT classmate Arash Ferdowsi, took it public in 2018 and sits on the board of Meta Platforms.
