Broadcom Inc.

Henry Samueli and Henry Nicholas founded Broadcom in 1991 while Samueli was still a professor at UCLA. The company began in Nicholas's garage with $5,000 in seed funding. Their initial focus was on broadband communications chips — technology that would eventually enable cable modems, DSL, and ultimately the infrastructure underpinning the internet as most people experience it.

Broadcom went public in April 1998, raising $115 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion. By the end of 1999, the stock had risen over 1,000% and both founders were billionaires. The dot-com bubble had turned a garage chip startup into one of the most valuable semiconductor companies in the world in under two years.

Henry Nicholas, the CEO who had built Broadcom's aggressive sales culture, was indicted in 2008 on charges including securities fraud related to stock options backdating and drug offences. The charges were eventually dismissed, but not before damaging the company's reputation. Nicholas had also been accused of building a secret lair beneath his Laguna Hills mansion. The lair was real.

In a twist of corporate identity, Avago Technologies — a smaller semiconductor company spun out of Hewlett-Packard — acquired the original Broadcom for $37 billion in 2016 and took Broadcom's name and ticker. The new Broadcom, led by CEO Hock Tan, embarked on an aggressive acquisition strategy that would turn it into one of the most valuable semiconductor companies in the world.

Broadcom completed the acquisition of VMware, the enterprise cloud software company, for $69 billion in November 2023 — one of the largest technology acquisitions in history. Hock Tan immediately restructured VMware's pricing, moving customers to subscription models and dramatically increasing costs. Enterprise customers were furious. Broadcom's revenue nearly doubled. Wall Street approved.