Lewis, a longtime player of videogames and Dungeons and Dragons, the forerunner paper-and-pen role-playing game, graduated with a degree in computer systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1993. Soon after he founded his graphics-chip company, Stellar Semiconductor, which was acquired by Broadcom in late 1999 for $60 million in stock but had run up to $168 million by the time the deal closed in March 2000, just as the Internet bubble burst.
Lewis walked away with $17 million and began working on his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at UCLA. But before he left Broadcom, he had gotten a pitch from a childhood gaming friend, Richard Dakan, who asked him to fund an online game about heroes. By chance Lewis also met a former engineer from videogame maker Atari, Bruce Rogers, who was developing a new graphics engine and was working on a game of his own. Lewis brought the two men together.
"The idea was to have enough capital to self-publish it or sell it on good terms" to a big publisher, says Lewis. He held a board seat and attended UCLA while the other guys got to work.
from
http://www.forbes.com/business/free_.../1004/100.html
