John Tu was born in China but grew up in Taiwan following his family's move in 1949 from Mao Zedong's communist regime. After going to Germany for college, where he earned an engineering degree, Tu immigrated to the U.S. in 1971 and later met his business partner David Sun, who is 10 years his junior, at a basketball league. In 1982 the two launched their first computer memory business out of a garage and sold it to PC manufacturer AST (now defunct) a few years later. But after pouring all their earnings into the stock market, the pair lost nearly everything on October 19, 1987, one of the worst days in Wall Street's history. Less than three months later, and again out of a garage, they started anew in the untapped market of surface-mount memory chips, eventually propelling Kingston Technology to become an industry leader in storage and memory products. Today the two billionaires still run the $6.6 billion (sales) privately held company from cubicles on the sales floor of Kingston's headquarters.