10 tech companies founded by husbands and wives

EMC this week struck a deal to acquire Archer Technologies – an enterprise governance, risk and compliance vendor based in Kansas. Archer was co-founded by a husband-and-wife team, Jon and Tara Darbyshire, with Jon serving as CEO and Tara as vice president of strategic accounts.

Indeed, husbands and wives team up in all sorts of ways in the IT industry. Google invested $3.9 million in a biotech company led by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The partnerships are sometimes menacing - a husband and wife team was recently arrested and accused of stealing $23 million from Cisco. But for this article, let's focus on law-abiding couples that founded and run some well-known and not-so-well-known tech companies. Here are 10 examples:

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Cisco

Cisco must be one of the most famous examples of a Fortune 500 company founded by a husband-and-wife team, with Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner starting the vendor in 1984. Says the Cisco Web site: "Husband and wife Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, both working for Stanford University, wanted to e-mail each other from their respective offices located in different buildings but were unable to due to technological shortcomings. A technology had to be invented to deal with disparate local area protocols; and as a result of solving their challenge - the multi-protocol router was born." Cisco was and still is a smashing success, but the couple is now divorced and Bosack and Lerner have moved on to other ventures.

VMware

In 1998 VMware was founded by a team including Diane Greene, the CEO, and Mendel Rosenblum, the chief scientist and Greene's husband. Together, they spearheaded the x86 server virtualization market and turned VMware into one of the most important companies in IT. EMC recognized VMware's promise and bought the company in 2004, but ultimately fired Greene in 2008. Rosenblum left VMware a few months later.

Flickr

Launched in 2004, this photo and video hosting Web site was founded by Stewart Butterfield and wife Caterina Fake. Flickr, which says it hosts more than 4 billion images, was acquired by Yahoo in 2005 for $35 million. Both husband and wife left the company in June 2008.

Super Micro Computer

Husband Charles Liang and wife Sara Liu co-founded Super Micro in 1993, and are still at the helm of this company which makes servers, workstations and storage systems. Based in San Jose, Calif., Super Micro employs 1,000 people and has generated $2 billion in sales over its 16 years of operation, the company says. Liang is still the president, CEO and chairman of the board while Liu is vice president of operations, treasurer and a director.

Six Apart

Ben and Mena Trott founded Six Apart in 2002 to sell blogging tools originally developed to support a blog written by Mena called dollarshort.org. "To make a better dollarshort.org, Ben and I wanted to make a better blogging tool and in October 2001, we released the first version of Movable Type," Mena explains on the company Web site. "Intended to be a fun way to pass the time while we looked for jobs after the bust, supporting and developing Movable Type quickly became a full time job for the both of us. Working out of our spare San Francisco bedroom as we iterated and our customer base grew, we realized in July 2002 that Movable Type could become something big and, our company, Six Apart was born."

Bebo

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An acronym for "blog early, blog often," Bebo is a social networking Web site founded in 2005 by Michael and Xochi Birch in San Francisco. AOL ended up purchasing Bebo for $850 million in March 2008, hoping to compete against more popular social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Michael Birch, who was born in England, explained in a 2006 interview that he met his wife, Xochi, in a bar in the United Kingdom while she was studying abroad. Along with his brother, the couple founded Bebo as a site for sharing photos and contacts and later relaunched it as a social network. "We thought it would be cool to create a social networking site around a global community of students in English speaking countries, and so that led to Bebo," he said in the interview. "It proved very early on to be very popular with universities, colleges and schools, particularly in the U.K., Ireland, U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand."

Marvell Technology

Marvell, a maker of enterprise and consumer hardware products, was co-founded in 1995 by Sehat Sutardja and Weili Dai, a husband and wife who met at the University of California at Berkeley. With 5,000 employees worldwide, Marvell says it ships 1 billion chips every year for various storage, mobile, networking and consumer technologies. Sutardja still holds down the fort as CEO while Dai is vice president of sales and heads up the company's communications and computing business unit.

Cuil

A search company founded by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson, Cuil is attempting to improve Web search with more detailed results, particularly in cases where the same word has different meanings when used in different contexts. While Costello, Cuil's CEO, is a veteran of IBM, Patterson is Cuil's president and previously worked for Google as the lead on several search projects.

QAD

Pamela Lopker founded the QAD enterprise resource planning software firm in 1979, after she developed software to help automate operations at her husband Karl's sandal-making company. Today, QAD focuses on supply chain collaboration and its products are used by more than 6,000 manufacturers in 90 countries. Pamela remains president and chairman of the board while Karl – who joined QAD in 1981 - serves as CEO, overseeing all aspects of QAD's business and operations.

Kaspersky Lab

Eugene and Natalya Kaspersky co-founded Kaspersky Lab in 1997 in Moscow and have each served as the company's CEO. The company and its founders are prominent in the antimalware security field, and its security lab catalogs more than 1 million threats per year. Despite being divorced, Eugene and Natalya each still hold critical roles with Kaspersky Lab. Eugene is listed as CEO and Natalya is listed as chairman on the company board of directors Web page. However, Natalya is also listed as CEO of Kaspersky's U.S. executive team.

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Related stories:

EMC acquires GRC vendor Archer Technologies

VMware loses Mendel Rosenblum, co-founder and husband of fired CEO Diane Greene

Has Cisco founder Bosack again unveiled the Next Big Thing?