Longtime TV exec Gerry Laybourne co-founded the women-centric cable TV station Oxygen, which was sold to NBC in October 2007.

The daughter of a soap opera actress, Laybourne turned to TV when she teamed up with her husband, Kit, to form a children's television production company in the late 1970s. A decade later, then-MTV chief Bob Pittman invited Laybourne to join the nascent company to start up a children's network called Nickelodeon. Four years later she was running the joint, and ultimately spent a decade and a half there, launching new channels (Nick at Night) and countless new shows (Rugrats, Powerpuff Girls) and turning what started as a five-person group into an multi-billion dollar franchise. Laybourne left Nickelodeon in 1996 to take the job of president of Disney/ABC. She spent four years overseeing the company's collection of TV properties like the Disney Channel, Lifetime, A&E, and the History Channel. When she finally got fed up with the Mickey Mouse bureaucracy, she walked. With great fanfare, $500 million in capital, investors/partners like Oprah Winfrey, Laybourne announced the launch of Oxygen in 1999.

Oxygen generated enormous buzz when it was announced, mostly because of all the big names involved in the new "convergence network." Yet despite plenty of financing and Oprah's blessing, the network never truly took off or posed serious competition to its chief rival, Lifetime. Part of it had to do with timing: The huge bets Oxygen made on the Internet got off the ground just as the tech market crumbled, and it was forced to retool its business plan and downscale its online presence. Laybourne later focused her energies on developing original programming, but while a couple of shows became minor successes (like The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency), a certifiable hit had yet to materialize when it was rumored in fall 2007 that Laybourne was in talks to sell the company. Sure enough, in October 2007, she hammered out a deal with Jeff Zucker to sell to NBC for $925 million.

Laybourne married her television producer husband Kit in 1970. Their son, Lawrence, is a comedy writer in Los Angeles who has worked on shows like Arrested Development and Cougar Town. Their daughter Emmy (it's a TV family, after all) is an actress. [Image via Getty]