Michael Dell
Founder and CEO, Dell
Build to order, and the largest tech buyout of its time
Rating
83Impact score
Domains
PCsSupply chainEnterprise hardware
Scouting report
Started assembling PCs in a University of Texas dorm room in 1984 and turned direct sales and negative working capital into a manufacturing weapon: the customer paid before the supplier did. He took the company private in a $24.4 billion buyout in 2013, then bought EMC, and with it VMware, for about $67 billion in 2016.
Curator’s note
The supply chain was the product. Everything else was a box.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Michael Dell by mikeandryan, licensed CC BY 2.0.
Sources
- 01Michael Dell en.wikipedia.org
- 02Dell Technologies en.wikipedia.org