SANDY LERNER

In the early 1980's, Lerner ran the computer system at the Stanford University business school. Her husband, Len Bosack, ran the computers for the Stanford University computer science department. In 1984 Lerner and Bosack developed hardware and software into a device that enabled the Stanford computers to communicate with any of the other computer systems scattered around the Stanford University campus. What they did was develop a device to connect the different networks, thus creating one big Stanford network. Today this device that forwards data packets from one computer site to another is called a router. But when Stanford eventually stood in their way about marketing this technology, Lerner and Bosack formed a company called Cisco Systems and took their new technology with them. This helped usher in a new age of communications, as today 70-80% of the Internet's infrastructure is made up of Cisco routers. In 1990 the company went public, but as a result of previous internal issues, Lerner was asked by the new management team to leave. Hearing that Lerner had been fired, Bosack also walked out. Today, now divorced from Bosack, Lerner is CEO of Urban Decay, a California cosmetics company.