On its first day of trading, Marvell's stock rose 278 percent. The chip company had been started five years earlier by a husband, a wife and a brother. Its chips read and wrote the data on hard disk drives, a dull job every computer needed done. In June 2000 the dot-com market was already cracking. Investors still lined up for a profitable chip designer with a product inside millions of PCs.

Two Brothers and Weili Dai

Sehat Sutardja, his wife Weili Dai and his brother Pantas Sutardja founded Marvell in 1995. Sehat was an engineer with a Berkeley doctorate. The company designed mixed-signal chips: parts that turn the faint analog signals on a spinning disk into clean digital data. Marvell did not own factories. It designed chips and paid others to make them, a model that kept costs low. Hard drive makers became its first big customers.

From Disk Drives to the Cloud

Marvell priced 6 million shares at $15 each on June 27, 2000, raising $90 million on Nasdaq as MRVL. The stock closed the day near four times the offer. The founders ran the company until 2016, when they left after an audit-committee review of its accounting. A new chief executive, Matt Murphy, steered Marvell toward chips for data centers and networks. It remains a public company, still on Nasdaq as MRVL.

Cover: Fireworks at Ryogoku (Ryogoku hanabi), from the series "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo", Utagawa Hiroshige. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for fireworks over a river (a marvel).