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It seems like being academically excellent and being successful in industry are totally different things. I still remember the hype about Udacity and Coursera a few years ago.

Beside VmWare and Akamai, I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact (even though VMware was tiny compared to what it is today when EMC acquired them)

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>I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact

Bose, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Financial Engines, Genentech, MathWorks, Boston Dynamics, Pixar (I think it counts), Arista Networks, MIPS, Rambus, Duolingo, Sun Microsystems. Depending on what your cut off is for made an impact, I'm sure there are dozens more from Stanford alone.

VMware (Stanford)

Akamai's CEO, Dr. Tom Leighton's math class at MIT, still my all-time favorite. It change my life, since I thought I will never be able to understand math above high school algebra.

Gilber Strang's linear algebra and Stewart's calcus is the other two.

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