Fusion-io's chief scientist was Steve Wozniak, the man who co-founded Apple. The Salt Lake City company made cards packed with flash memory that plugged straight into a server, skipping the slow trip out to spinning hard drives. Facebook was among its biggest buyers. Revenue jumped from $0.6 million in fiscal 2008 to $36.2 million in fiscal 2010. When it filed to go public in 2011, data centers strained under social networks and cloud apps, and Fusion-io sold speed.

Canvas Becomes Fusion

The company was incorporated in December 2005 as Canvas Technologies. David Flynn, its chief executive, and Rick White started it in Utah. It sold its first products in April 2007. Its ioMemory cards used NAND flash, the same kind of chip found in a USB stick, and its software made that flash act like a fast extension of the server's memory. Dell, HP and IBM resold the cards inside their own machines. Headcount grew from 262 to 395 in nine months.

Nineteen Dollars to Eleven

Fusion-io priced its IPO at $19 a share and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange as FIO on June 9, 2011. The stock opened at $25, touched $33 and closed its first day at $22.50. The offering raised about $234 million. Rivals soon crowded into flash storage. In June 2014 SanDisk agreed to buy Fusion-io for $11.25 a share in cash, about $1.1 billion, and the deal closed that summer.

Cover: Looking out of Boat Cave, a flash light picture, No. 1132, Henry Hamilton Bennett. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a flash-light photograph (flash memory).