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40 Under 40 They’re smart, they’re accomplished, they run multimillion-dollar enterprises — and oh, yes, they’re young. Some helm technology companies, others lead financial firms, others are at the top the health-care game. On these pages, meet the faces of the future. (Move over, Mr. Gates.) Spring 2008 , Page 45continued 2
David T. Blair Blair has been CEO of HealthExtras — a provider of pharmacy benefit-management services and supplemental benefits for HMOs, unions, employers and governments — since 1999. His goal is simple: to keep clients’ drug costs low by encouraging them to use generics rather than costly brand names. According to Blair, HealthExtras’ clients use generics about 60 percent of the time; the industry average is around 50 percent. During 2007, Blair added roughly $700 million in annualized revenue from new contracts, while retaining 98 percent of the company’s existing clients. Last January, its subsidiary, Catalyst Rx, renewed one of its biggest contracts: handling drug benefits for the state of Louisiana. Analysts peg the company’s long-term earnings-growth rate at 25 percent per year. Healthy news, indeed.
Alexis Borisy Borisy’s science background — he has a bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of Chicago and a master’s in chemistry from Harvard — has served him well in business. He started with a simple idea: to test FDA-approved drugs with expired patents that were available for use. Why not combine drugs and see if they might work better than individual ones? In just seven-plus years since CombinatoRX launched, Borisy, who dropped out of Harvard’s biochem doctorate program to run the company, has shepherded six products into clinical trials, targeting multiple immuno-inflammatory diseases. In 2003, he was named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst and Young New England, and Innovator of the Year by MIT’s Technology Review magazine. Friends decribe him as “charismatic, persuasive and single-minded.” No surprise: That’s how you get things done.
Mark F. Bradley Bradley, an Ohio University graduate, has been at this diversified financial-products and services company since 1997 in a variety of roles. He took the helm in May 2005, after the late Robert E. Evans retired. The company has $1.9 billion in assets, and is in 50 locations and 38 ATMs in Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky.
Jon (Jonny) S. Brumley Brumley and his father, I. Jon, founded Encore, which acquires and develops North American oil and natural-gas reserves, in April 1998. Both men have extensive backgrounds in oil and gas — the senior Brumley was CEO of Southland Royalty, a Texas oil-and-gas concern, from 1974 to 1985, then started Cross Timbers Oil with two colleagues. As a teenager, the younger Brumley logged considerable time in the oil fields; after getting his B.A. in marketing from the University of Texas, he went to work for Pioneer Natural Resources, where he was manager of commodity risk and commercial projects. He joined Dad in 1998, becoming CEO in January 2006. Encore went public in March 2001; since then, it has made 11 acquisitions totaling $563 million for various energy companies in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota and Oklahoma. By all accounts, 2007 was a lucrative year: Encore plans to invest $445 million for drilling and development, up from $370 million in 2007. Talk about a chip off the old block.
Michael Chasen Prior to 1997, Chasen was a member of the Higher Education Practice at KPMG Consulting, the professional-services firm that caters to colleges and universities. He implemented wide-ranging software systems, and also managed online-development projects within the U.S. Department of Education. Then one day he and a friend, Matthew Pittinsky, had an epiphany: Why not design their own educational software and service company? “Online learning was more of an idea than an industry,” recalls Chasen, a Georgetown MBA. Eleven years later, Blackboard is the top-rated education products-and-services provider, with more than 3,400 clients globally. But with success comes responsibility. “We’re challenging each other to create, or improve, ideas with solutions that will make educating students easier — whether they’re in pre-kindergarten or executives taking professional-development classes,” he adds. Three years ago, Blackboard acquired WebCT, another e-learning organization, for $180 million in cash. Blackboard’s 2007 revenues were a cool $139 million, with a net profit margin of 31 percent. We could all, it seems, learn something from Chasen.
Steve Christensen Fresh out of Brigham Young University, where he played football, Christensen entered the corporate world through the glamorous task of selling farm equipment through classified ads. By his mid-twenties, he was working in Novell’s legal and business-development departments. Today, the Salt Lake City native, a graduate of BYU’s law school, oversees an organization that connects planned communities with a fiber-optic network to every home and business. (Broadweave was founded in 1999 by a group of heavy hitters from Bain Capital, AOL/Time Warner, Hewlett-Packard and Novell.) Under his watch, the company built the first primary-line VOIP network, the first primary-line Ethernet network and the first primary-line voice, video and data over IP network, among others. “You succeed or fail by virtue of your relationships,” he has said. “Success requires working to make those relationships productive.”
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