IIRC, VMWare was started by a Stanford professor and directly based on his research in virtualization. I can't find the full story of the transition from acad

IIRC, VMWare was started by a Stanford professor and directly based on his research in virtualization. I can't find the full story of the transition from academia to industry, but SimOS looks related for sure: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel_Rosenblum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendel_Rosenblum (If anyone has details, please chime in.) - Pixar had a pretty long road to industry, but it has deep academic roots. Co-founder Ed Catmull published significant original research in computer graphics. - Yahoo was also started by 2 Stanford grad students, although it wasn't based on any research that I'm aware of. - Werner Vogels was one of my professors at Cornell, doing work on distributed computing, e.g. on gossip protocols, and he is now CTO of Amazon. - Guido van Rossum worked in Andrew Tanenbaum's lab (a professor whose OS book you might have), and Python was at least partly inspired by that experience. Python now runs much of the industry :) It would indeed be nice to see a list of "papers that companies are based on". The PageRank paper is well known (although Google search no longer resembles it). I suspect you can do the same thing for VMWare and Pixar, at the very least. Those two companies relied on significant technical advances. EDIT: Also Cisco and Stanford: https://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/cisco-systems/ https://www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org/cisco-systems/ This goes all the way back to Hewlett Packard, although I'm not sure if they're closer to Yahoo's case (same people) or Google's case (same subject area): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard#History