Dr. Tom Leighton, a former CSAIL researcher and MIT professor, co-founded what the New York Times has described as "one of the most important web companies that most people haven't heard of."
While at MIT Leighton worked on algorithms with then-MIT PhD Daniel Lewin that resulted in Akamai Technologies, a content-delivery network that earns $1.5 billion in sales annually and is now responsible for roughly 30 percent of all web traffic.
Read more about Akamai's CEO in a recent Forbes profile, where he talks about how working down the hall from WWW inventor Tim Berners-Lee helped spur him to think about applying his networking background to reducing congestion on the Internet.