Mr. Greene was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in St. Louis in the 1950's. He was among the first black students to attend school at Washington University. He completed his master's degree at Purdue in 1962 and, following a four-year tour in the U.S. Air Force, worked in research at Fairchild Semiconductor. He completed his Ph.D. at Santa Clara University in 1970 and founded his first business, Technology Development Corporation (TDC), in 1971. He continued to run TDC while serving as assistant chairman of the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford from 1972 until 1975 when he left academia to devote himself full-time to his business. By 1985 TDC was traded publicly, had more than 300 employees, and was recognized by Black Enterprise as one of the top 100 businesses.

After an equity interest in TDC was sold to the Federal Systems Division of Penn Central, Mr. Greene launched ZeroOne Systems, Inc. as a spin-out. ZeroOne sold large-scale scientific computer systems to the government market for engineering and research. In two years ZeroOne reached $15 million in annual revenue and a sale was negotiated to Sterling Software, with Mr. Greene remaining as group president until 1989.

Taking on a different challenge, Mr. Greene became president of Networked Picture Systems, Inc., headed a successful turn-around operation and assisted with the merger of the company with 68000, Inc. After several years in private venture capital, Mr. Greene organized New Vista Capital in 1993 and was a general partner in that company.

Mr. Greene received the Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award from Santa Clara University in 1993 and the Black Alumni Achievement Award from Washington University in 1991. He received Purdue's OECE award in 1999.

During his career, Mr. Greene was successful in technology and venture capital endeavors, raising some $80 million for minority- and women-owned businesses.

But it was during the early years in St. Louis that he learned one of his most valuable lessons, according to an interview he gave to Palo Alto Online after he was named one of the 50 most important African-Americans in technology. Mr. Greene told about efforts to persuade restaurants near campus to serve black students. One day, his group of friends was prepared to stage a sit-in at a pizza place — only to find the owners were willing to serve them.

"...From that day, I've always said, 'You have to be prepared for opportunity when it arrives,'" Mr. Greene said.

(source: stltoday.com)