The Ousted Founders

There are many entrepreneurs who founded many remarkable starts up companies, which later became quite well known companies. But unfortunately, in many cases situation forced the founders to leave their very own company or from the post of the CEO.Here is the list of few founders who were removed from their post.

Steve Jobs, Apple

Steve Jobs is the co-founder and CEO of Apple. He founded Apple in 1976. In 1983, Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple's CEO, but Steve was fired by CEO John Sculley. In 2005, at Stanford, Jobs said 'How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of future began to diverge and eventually, we fell out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him.' Around the same time, Jobs founded another computer company, NeXT Computer and in 1996, Apple announced that it would buy NeXT for $429 million. The deal was finalized in late 1996 bringing Jobs back to the company he had co-founded and Jobs returned as CEO in 1997.

Larry Page, Google

Larry Page is best known as the co-founder of Google. He and Sergey Brin co-founded Google in 1998. Till April 4, 2011, he was the CEO of Google, but in 2001 Eric Schmidt took the post of the CEO. Ten years later Schmidt became executive chairman, and Larry Page stepped back into the main leadership position as chief executive.

Sandy Lerner, Cisco Systems

Sandy Lerner was a co-founder of Cisco Systems. But in 1990, just after six years after she found the company, she was fired by Cisco System's president .According to Don Valentine, who was the Cisco chairman and seven company VP's stormed his office one day and threatened to quit unless Lerner was let go. Lerner was removed shortly after that.

Diane Greene, VMware

Diane Greene was a founder of VMware, a computer virtualization company, and the CEO from 1998 to 2008. She was also ranked No. 22 on Fortune's Most Powerful Women list. She had helped VMware to grow from a start up to a full-fledged business software firm. But she was fired from her job as CEO in July 2008 after the company's stock dove 60 percent.

David Neeleman, JetBlue

David Neeleman, an entrepreneur founded JetBlue commercial airlines in 1999. As the CEO of JetBlue Airways, Neeleman donated his entire salary to the JetBlue Crewmember Crisis Fund, which was established for JetBlue employees who had fallen on hard times. But he was removed from the CEO position in 2007, and was replaced by David Barger as CEO of JetBlue.