The earlier 1997 paper on Disco [1] by Bugnion, … was written just before VMware was founded in 1998. It was circulated for review and reputedly made its way to Bill Gates. However, VMware was self funded; so Gates wasn't an early investor. Disco was a lot more similar to VMware's first product before Intel+AMD added VT-x to make hardware assisted virtualization easier.
Bill/MS acquired Connectix’s virtualization technology [1] in 2003. VirtualPC and Virtual Server went on to become Hyper-V and power Azure to this day. VPC was released in 1997 and VMW founded in 1998.
[1] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Classes/838/Spring2013/Pape...