Now, Ph.D level research is an important catalyst for certain "hard tech" companies. But I don't think the founders need to have done the research, just be aware of it. An undergraduate degree is sufficient formal training to figure out and harness something specific revealed by others in advanced research.
Hmmm, I doubt that taking an OS project course or reading some virtualization research papers gives anyone the amount of insight into the nitty-gritty details needed to make a production-quality VM product. There is simply no substitute for thousands of hours of hard work pushing the boundaries on a field in order to get that required expertise.
Yes, perhaps today someone could improve upon VMware's products and form a competitor, but when VMware was first forming, I doubt that anyone else had the required expertise besides the few research groups who were actively working on virtualization for PC-class machines.
One alternative option is to be a founder who raises money and then hires someone who has actually done that research.
(Of course, I'm only talking about startups founded on research technologies ... you don't need a Ph.D. to found the majority of software startups)
New technologies that are actually important as competitive advantages, and not yet widely distributed, aren't like little packets of soup mix one can throw into a meal. In practice you can't say "Oh, I read about nonlinear discombobulation transducers in Wired and now I'm going to tell my engineers to use them". By the time the knowledge is nugget-ized enough to be in a Wired article it's already way behind current research.
The job of a CEO of a "hard tech" company is primarily to make choices about investing in new technologies and applying them in products. Does it really seem reasonable that someone who is merely "aware of" Professor X developing idea Y can make optimal decisions about those investments and applications? Is it plausible that Intel would be what it is today without Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce's knowledge of semiconductor physics?