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.)
In business, high IQs and MBAs are just table stakes, and round-the-clock work and undying dedication are a given. That makes our inaugural compilation of the 40 most influential leaders under 40 an especially elite group.
Principal criteria for inclusion were current importance and ascendant trajectory, as well as those crucial intangibles: leadership, professionalism, credibility, reputation and, of course, industry expertise.
The leaders profiled on the pages that follow stand at the helm of every type of business imaginable. To be sure, many faces will be familiar, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (just 23!) and Yahoo’s Jerry Yang (a relative codger at 39). But you’ll also meet some lesser-knowns: Mark Vadon, the 38-year-old executive chairman of Blue Nile, a specialty jeweler in Seattle; and our cover boy, Dave Habiger, 39, the grand poobah of Sonic Solutions, a Novato, California, company that creates the digital-media software that makes CDs and DVDs run.
There’s some gender balance, with two women on the list: 32-year-old Julie Smolyansky, of Lifeway Foods; and Michelle Peluso, 36, president and CEO of Travelocity.
You will be able, no doubt, to make endless arguments on behalf of those who didn’t make the cut, or against some who did; that’s half the fun of an exercise like this. We welcome all feedback. As with any ranking that involves subjective criteria, this is a work in progress, one we intend to hone as we make it an annual rite of passage. One thing, though, is certain: These are people you’ll be hearing about for decades to come.
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David T. Blair
Title: CEO, HealthExtras
City: Rockville, Maryland
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $118 billion
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
Title: President, CEO and Director, CombinatoRX
City: Cambridge, Massachusetts
Age: 36
Recent Market Cap: $180 million
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
Title: President and CEO, People’s Bancorp
City: Marietta, Ohio
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: $242 million
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
Title: President and CEO, Encore Acquisition
City: Fort Worth, Texas
Age: 37
Recent Market Cap: $1.84 billion
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
Title: Cofounder and CEO, Blackboard
City: Washington, D.C.
Age: 36
Recent Market Cap: $829 million
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
Title: CEO, Broadweave Networks
City: South Jordan, Utah
Age: 36
Recent Market Cap: Privately held
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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Jeffrey A. Citron
Title: Founder, Chairman and CEO, Vonage
City: Edison, New Jersey
Age: 36
Recent Market Cap: $305 million
Citron’s story is a little like that of Steve Jobs: In 2006, Citron was booted out of Vonage, the broadband telephone-service provider he helped create in 2000, only to return as interim CEO in April 2007. The company, which had recently gone public, was foundering. By the time he got back in the saddle, its share price had dropped more than 80 percent. His first mission: to get a stay on a judge’s order that the company was not to sign up any new customers during a patent-infringement lawsuit (later settled out of court) in which it was embroiled with Verizon. He then reduced his workforce by 10 percent and hacked the advertising budget by $110 million — all tough decisions. But with Citron in command, Vonage posted revenues of $216 million in the fourth quarter of 2007, a 19 percent jump from the same period in 2006.
Previously, Citron did a stint at the Island ECN, a computerized trading system designed to automate the order-execution process, which he founded in 1995. In 1998, he left to become chairman and CEO of Datek Online Holdings before heading to Vonage.
Jonathan Z. Cohen
Title: CEO, Resource Capital
City: New York
Age: 37
Recent Market Cap: $239 million
Surely the easiest way onto this list, which rewards precocious power and influence, is when Mom or Dad paves the way. Cohen, a Penn grad who earned a law degree (cum laude) from American University, has been CEO of Resource Capital, a commercial real-estate specialty-finance company, since his father, Edward, the firm’s chairman, stepped aside in March 2005.
We try to discount legacies, though, and Cohen stands squarely on his own two feet: Since 2003, he has been the general partner of Castine Partners, a financial-services hedge fund. Oh, yes — he also produces independent films, among them the 1998 comedy Safe Men and On the Ropes, a 1999 documentary about amateur boxing.
Nicholas DeIuliis
Title: President and CEO, CNX Gas
City: Pittsburgh
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $6 billion
Like many on this list, DeIuliis has been in a hurry. Leveraging his Penn State chemical-engineering degree into a job in Consol Energy’s R&D group, DeIuliis notched several promotions working full-time while earning his MBA and a law degree from Duquesne — and finishing first in his class. He quickly rose to become vice president of strategic planning at Consol, where he was responsible for maximizing the value of the company’s assets. This led to the creation of CNX Gas in June 2005. In October 2006, Platts, a supplier of energy information, nominated CNX for its Hydrocarbon Producer of the Year award — a worldwide competition in which the four other finalists were Saudi Aramco, CNOOC, Peabody Energy and Williams. CNX didn’t win, but no matter: It’s now truly playing in the big leagues.
Matthew C. Diamond
Title: Chairman and CEO, Alloy Media + Marketing
City: NEW YORK
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $104.7 million
This question once kept Diamond awake at night: How could he help advertisers reach 10-to-24-year-olds? The answer became Alloy Media + Marketing. The company connects corporations to more than 22 million young consumers across its Teen.com network each month, where users can chat with new pals, win prizes and take quizzes. Alloy also develops and produces such entertainment properties as the Gossip Girl television and book series and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Before cofounding the company in January 1996, Diamond, who earned his B.A. in international studies from the University of North Carolina and his MBA from Harvard, worked in finance and operations at GE, spending time in the company’s Tokyo offices. Now, he says, he’s “seeking ways new technology and information can be applied to new media opportunities.”
Dave Habiger Title: CEO, Sonic Solutions
City: NOVATO, California
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $227.8 million
"I’m inspired by things created by groups of people," says Habiger, the CEO of Sonic, which creates the digital-media software that makes CDs and DVDs operate. Under the leadership of this individual, though, Sonic has thrived. Habiger joined the company in 1993 and moved steadily up the ranks, landing in the boss’s chair in 2005.
His goals aren’t too lofty: He would like, he says, to become the "GE of digital-media software." Despite the fact that he laments not “building plug-in architecture around professional audio mastering product, or engaging in search and contextual advertising,” à la Google, he might just get his wish one of these days: Sonic’s revenues in 2007 were $150 million. That’s inspirational.
Omar Hamoui
Title: Founder and CEO, AdMob
City: San Mateo, California
Age: 30
Recent Market Cap: Privately held
Two weeks before the birth of AdMob, a global marketplace that has served more than 1 billion mobile advertisements, a light bulb went off in Hamoui’s head: Six months earlier, he had begun working on FotoChatter, a mobile social network run by cellphone-camera users.
But he had difficulty promoting his products.
Then he found a mobile Web site and ran an ad there. He was charged a penny per click, which enabled him to grab good customers for just 10 cents a user. It occurred to him that others might appreciate this as much as he did — and a company was born.
AdMob launched in January 2006, and the response was overwhelming. With a year, it generated 250 million mobile advertising page views per month in more than 150 countries; the network continues to grow at a rate of 150 percent per month. Advertisers range from small startups to Top 10 global brands. Clearly, Wharton’s loss (Hamoui is on extended leave from the school) is AdMob’s gain.
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Todd Hornbeck
Title: CEO/President/Director/Founder/Chairman, Hornbeck Offshore
City: Covington, Louisiana
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: $1.1 billion
The original Hornbeck Offshore Services, founded in 1980 by Todd’s father, Larry, merged with New Orleans–based Tidewater in 1996. Hornbeck Offshore owns a fleet of more than 80 vessels — including 12 tugboats and 16 barges — which mainly serve the energy industry. The younger Hornbeck’s company went public in 2004, with trading beginning at $13 per share.
Jeff Housenbold Title: CEO, Shutterfly
City: Redwood City, California
Age: 37
Recent Market Cap: $385 million
Housenbold knows his way around the Internet: He had gigs at both eBay and AltaVista before signing on as CEO of Shutterfly in 2004. He had his work cut out for him: When he joined the eight-year-old digital-photo company, it had “a culture of survivorship, rather than a culture of winning,” he says. “The company lived through the carnage of the dot-com crash. Scarred by the experience, employees learned to avoid risk and not make waves.”
He encouraged fresh ideas, and recruited talent at all levels of the company — focusing on properly nurturing, rewarding and enhancing that talent. “With annual revenues growing at 50 percent per year, it would be easy simply to focus on the top and bottom line, and not put into place the culture and discipline to become a great company,” says Housenbold, who got his undergraduate degree in economics and business administration from Carnegie Mellon and his MBA from Harvard. But the father of three young boys doesn’t (yet) think of himself as a success. Not until “we create shareholder value, a brand that will outlast any individual and a culture that will make employees look back on their time at the company fondly.” With 2007 revenues of $186.7 million — up 51 percent from 2006 — he’s well on his way.
Gray W. Hudkins
Title: CEO, President and Director, Langer
City: Deer Park, New York
Age: 32
Recent Market Cap: $25.2 million
In 2005, Hudkins took the reins at Langer, which designs, manufactures and distributes medical products for orthopedic, orthotic and prosthetic markets around the world. He was familiar with the territory; before joining the company in October 2004, he worked for Warren Kanders, chairman of Langer’s board and the company’s largest stockholder, at Kanders & Company. Hudkins managed Langer’s acquisition of Silipos, the skin-care and skin-protection concern, and joined Langer as COO soon after. On January 1, 2006, he took over as president and CEO.
Much soon changed: In order to reduce cycle times and increase efficiency, Hudkins hired a consultant to overhaul manufacturing, with the idea of letting employees work as a team, rather than have only one task. True to his efficient nature, he made the consulting company’s fee contingent on its achieving operational results.
Joshua James
Title: CEO and Cofounder, Omniture
City: Orem, Utah
Age: 34
Recent Market Cap: $1.3 Billion
James had eight majors at Brigham Young before moving on to its business school, where he met his future partner, John Pestana. The two had been creating Web pages for friends; they decided to charge for their services, and called their company JP Interactive. Within 18 months they had launched five other businesses, including ScriptSearch, a database of CGI and programming scripts. They sold it for a few hundred thousand dollars and consolidated their four remaining firms into MyComputer.com, which provided Web-maintenance tools to small and medium-sized businesses. They were close to a $57 million acquisition deal in October 2000 when the bubble burst; they had to let 48 people go with no severance. (James tracked them down in 2006 and reimbursed them.)
The duo persevered, however, creating a small-business division that sold their products for $10 to $100 a month. In 2002, they sold it to Verisign and named the new firm Omniture — a marketing-intelligence company that tracks its customers’ Web sites: how much money is being spent on them and how effective their ad campaigns are. The Discovery Channel, Wal-Mart and Gannett now all use Omniture’s Web-analytics solution, SiteCatalyst. After 12 consecutive quarters of growth and six straight of profitability, Omniture recently closed on a $14.5 million round of VC funding led by Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
J. Mariner Kemper
Title: Ceo and Chairman, UMB Financial
City: Kansas City, Missouri
Age: 35
Recent Market Cap: $1.6 billion
Banking is in Kemper’s blood; his family has been in the industry since 1918, when it bought the City Center Bank in Kansas City. Kemper joined UMB when he was just 16. His task? To verify employment for credit-card applicants. In May 2004, the University of Puget Sound graduate became the company’s CEO, and quickly set about broadening its reach. That he did: Today, the multibank holding company owns and operates 141 banks from Illinois to Arizona. His ancestors are surely smiling.
Dara Khosrowshahi
Title: President and CEO, Expedia
City: Bellevue, Washington
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: $7.1 billion
Khosrowshahi came to the U.S. from Iran at age 9; he earned a B.A. in engineering from Brown in 1991, and worked at Allen & Company until 1998. That year, he began working on the merger of Home Shopping Network and USA Networks, then went to Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp, which bought Expedia in 2003. He became Expedia’s CEO when it branched off as a publicly traded company in 2005.
He is passionate about travel and about creating positive experiences for his clients. “Every second of every day we have an Expedia customer returning from a trip,” he says. “How do we help them find inspiration for their next trip? How do we help our supply partners connect with the more than 50 million travelers who visit our Web sites monthly? Technology plus the creativity and enthusiasm of our employees make it possible.”
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Jon E. Kirchner
Title: CEO and President, DTS
City: Agoura Hills, California
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: $420 million
In 1993, a little film called Jurassic Park burst into the public consciousness. Audiences raved about the special effects — not just the dinosaurs, but also the sound. The latter came courtesy of a small startup called Digital Theater System, which made its Hollywood debut in the Steven Spielberg movie (the director was an initial investor in the firm). Around the same time, Kirchner, armed with a B.A. in economics from Claremont McKenna, came onboard. A certified public accountant, he had been working at Price Waterhouse, advising companies on financial and operational restructuring, market position and business turnaround.
Kirchner became CEO in 2001, and DTS has since catapulted itself into theaters around the world, as well as audio/video receivers, DVD and Blu-ray HD players, personal computers, car-audio products, video-game consoles and home-theater systems.
In 2005, the company snapped up Lowry Digital Images, a privately held company noted for film restoration and enhancement. The $11 million acquisition enabled DTS to capitalize on the huge demand for high-definition DVD products. The companies’ 2007 revenues were $36.2 million. That’s something to talk about — loudly.
Peter Kosann
Title: COO, Connoisseur Media
City: Westport, Connecticut
Age: 37
Recent Market Cap: $154.7 million
You might think you have to be a CEO to be on this list. But we didn’t feel right excluding Kosann. Until this January, he was COO of Westwood One, the largest radio-programming company in America. During his seven-year tenure, Kosann, a Brown graduate, launched the new WestwoodOne.com, which offers interactive, streaming and downloadable content to a worldwide audience, among many other things.
Then he was offered a position as COO at Connoisseur Media, a five-year-old company started by radio executives Jeffrey D. Warshaw and Michael O. Driscoll. Connoisseur owns or operates 22 stations — 17 of which are already on the air (the others will be built this year). Like every good businessman, Kosann jumped at the chance to start something new.
I. Joseph Massoud Title: CEO, Compass Diversified Holdings
City: Westport, Connecticut
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $405 million
Massoud, a graduate of Claremont McKenna and Harvard Business School, has been CEO of this $600 million private-equity firm since its inception in December 2005. During his tenure at Compass, Massoud — a former vice president at Petroleum Heat and Power and Colony Capital, a Los Angeles–based private-equity shop specializing in distressed real estate and corporate assets — has snapped up nine companies and increased sales by about $100 million just in the last year. “I’d like to see shareholders rewarded for putting trust in our team,” he says. “I’d also like to see our organization grow and have some real permanence, which means constant thinking about management growth and succession.”
Kenneth McBride
Title: President and CEO, Stamps.com
City: Los Angeles
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $182 million
In 2004, the U.S. Postal Service began letting consumers design their own stamps. (Elvis! Marilyn! Nascar!) Two years later, businesses were allowed to follow suit. This was good news for McBride, the CEO of Stamps.com, a software-based service that, in conjunction with the USPS, lets customers calculate, and print, U.S. postage from the comfort of their personal computers. (Of course, you pay for the privilege: A sheet of 20 first-class stamps — face value $8.20 — costs $18.99 through Stamps.com.)
Initially, the company’s stock soared. But then TheSmokingGun.com printed stamps depicting such unsavory characters as Slobodan Milosevic. The USPS was not amused, and shut down the program. McBride, a former research analyst for Salomon Smith Barney (he has a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford, as well as a Stanford MBA), who had been in charge since 2001, was devastated.
Within a year, Stamps.com had overhauled its screening process, and the USPS softened its opposition. From May to September 2007, the company sold 3.5 million custom stamps and made $2.4 million in profits, up 7 percent from the year before.
Matthew McCauley
Title: CEO and Chairman, the Gymboree Corporation
City: San Francisco
Age: 34
Recent Market Cap: $1.2 billion
The youngest CEO to helm the 32-year-old, $700 million children’s activity and clothing firm, McCauley believes his youth is an asset. A graduate of Brigham Young’s business school, he got his start handling distribution at Payless ShoeSource and as manager of business solutions at the Gap. In 2006, he took over the top job at Gymboree. It’s a huge task: The company has nearly 600 stores throughout the U.S. That doesn’t include its 80 outlets, 100 Janie and Jack and 20 Crazy 8 shops that sell children’s clothes. Nor does it take into consideration the nearly 300 Gymboree Play & Music centers around the globe. Ah, to be young.
C. Randal Mills
Title: CEO, Osiris Therapeutics
City: Baltimore
Age: 36
Recent Market Cap: $312 Million
Mills, who has a Ph.D. in drug development from the University of Florida, is a leader among biotech CEOs. He certainly thinks big: He wants to win FDA approval for the world’s first stem-cell therapy. “Every day the therapy is not on the market, both adults and children go without life-saving treatments,” he says.
Mills believes his company is poised for success. At Regeneration Technologies, the biotech firm he helped found in 1998, he led the company from modest upstart to thriving corporation. When Osiris appointed him CEO in 2004, it wanted the same. How has he done? At the start of 2008, the company secured a $224.7 million contract with the U.S. Department of Defense to produce a cache of Prochymal, an adult stem-cell therapy for gastrointestinal injury. We’d say that’s pretty good.
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Ian Morris
Title: CEO, HouseValues
City: Kirkland, Washington
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $65 million
Before joining HouseValues, Morris, a Harvard MBA, ran MSN HomeAdvisor, Microsoft’s online real-estate business, which he helped launch in 1997. HouseValues, which provides marketing and technology services for residential real-estate agents, operates both HouseValues.com and JustListed.com. Morris is quick to admit that the climate is not easy, especially these days: “Motivating our team to look past the short-term challenges and focus on the enormous opportunity in front of us helps keep me fired up,” he says.
David Oles
Title: Cofounder, DNP Photo Imaging America
City: San Marcos, Texas
Age: 37
Recent Market Cap: Privately Held
If you’ve ever used one of those self-service digital photo–development machines at a drugstore, you may have Oles to thank. Oles, who founded Pixel Magic Imaging with his father, Henry, in 1992, led the creation of some of the first self-service digital-photo kiosks. In 2004, Pixel Magic was bought by Japan-based Dai Nippon Printing, which posted $13 billion in revenues in 2006. (Oles is now the senior vice president of research and development.) Pixel Magic officially changed its name to DNP Photo Imaging America last year; we look forward to watching what develops.
Michelle Peluso
Title: President And CEO, Travelocity
City: South Lake, Texas
Age: 36
Recent Market Cap: Privately Held
When she was 15, Peluso sent a series of letters to an organization planning a media trip to the Soviet Union until she persuaded them to take her along. Nowadays, the CEO of online travel service Travelocity makes sure customers have an easier time planning their own excursions. A graduate of Wharton and Oxford, Peluso founded last-minute reservations portal Site59.com in 2000. Two years later, Travelocity bought her startup, and the next year she became CEO. Under her leadership, annual revenues have increased every year, with 2006 revenues reaching $1.1 billion, up from $83 million in 2005. She’s now taking the company global, forging partnerships with sites in Europe and Asia and spearheading its acquisitions of smaller trip-reservation portals LastMinute.com and Zuji, ensuring that Travelocity customers never have to roam alone.
Kevin Plank
Title: Founder, Chairman and CEO, Under Armour
City: Baltimore
Age: 35
Recent Market Cap: $1.8 billion
As a teenager, Plank and his brother, Scott, sold Guatemalan bracelets at Grateful Dead shows. Then they began “reproducing” concert T-shirts and selling them outside venues for nearly $10 less than the official price. But he really hit his stride as a football player at the University of Maryland. In 1995, he began using a type of moisture-wicking fabric to make his practice tees. Under Armour, his $700 million sports-apparel company, has grown by leaps and bounds ever since. Fans include Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens. Score!
Michael G. Rubin
Title: Chairman and CEO, GSI Commerce
City: King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
Age: 35
Recent Market Cap: $638.5 million
After dropping out of Villanova, Rubin started GSI Commerce in 1999. Today, the Nasdaq-listed firm builds and runs online stores for such brands as Ace Hardware, Linens-N-Things and HBO. “I love being at the forefront of an industry that has experienced such tremendous growth and innovation, and one that presents a great daily challenge to find new ways to enhance consumers’ online shopping experiences,” he says.
Mark Shapiro
Title: CEO, Six Flags
City: New York
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: $186.5 million
Shapiro spent 12 years at ESPN in production and programming before signing on to Six Flags, attempting to revitalize a company that had posted annual losses since 2002 — its 30 amusement parks nationwide (since trimmed to 21) were considered little more than hangouts for idle teens. But the tenacious, in-your-face Shapiro had a plan to overhaul the company’s image by turning Six Flags into a family-friendly park. Then, in 2007, unusually inclement weather in Georgia and Texas — plus a gruesome accident at a Kentucky Six Flags — led to a downturn in attendance in July, typically a peak month. Nonetheless, thanks in part to the new family-friendly rides and a focus on customer service (both part of Shapiro’s three-year initiative), Six Flags has doubled its income from corporate sponsorship and ticket sales. Total revenue for the fourth quarter of 2007 increased 7 percent to around $111 million, up from $104 million during the same period the previous year. Talk about a wild ride.
Phil Shawe
Title: Co-CEO, Transperfect
City: New York
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: Privately Held
In high school, Shawe’s dedication and commitment to customer service made him Sears’s top appliance pusher in the Southeast. Several years later, those same skills helped him persuade a multinational mining giant to use his company, TransPerfect, to translate numerous documents for a proposed project in Russia. Shawe cofounded TransPerfect in (where else?) his dorm room at New York University in 1992 with fellow Stern School of Business student Elizabeth Elting. He helped it expand to three continents; it now provides a full range of business translation services for a plethora of multinational corporations. Its 2007 revenues were north of $150 million — an enviable figure in any language.
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Julie Smolyansky
Title: President, CEO and Director, Lifeway Foods
City: Morton Grove, Illinois
Age: 32
Recent Market Cap: $175 million
Lifeway, a health-food company, was started in 1986 by Smolyansky’s father, Michael, a Russian immigrant. She recalls traveling to food shows around the country to help her dad promote kefir, a Russian yogurt-like drink. By 1988, Lifeway was doing so well that he decided to take it public. He had no idea what that meant, his daughter says, but apparently he did something right: Lifeway is still traded on the Nasdaq. In 1997, Julie, a University of Illinois at Chicago graduate, joined the company as director of sales and marketing; she became CEO in June 2002, after her father died of a heart attack. Under her guidance, the company has seen an increase in sales of more than $30 million — that’s 30 percent per year — since she started; its products are sold in all 50 states. Lifeway has also added low-carb, organic and kids’ versions of its products. Earlier this year, it tacked on a $2.5 million production-expansion project to its main headquarters — its first major expansion in more than eight years. Smolyansky’s father would surely be proud.
Adam Stewart
Title: CEO, Sandals Resorts International
City: Montego Bay, Jamaica
Age: 27
Recent Market Cap: Privately held
(See Filling Big Sandals)
Jeff Stibel
Title: President, Website pros
City: Jacksonville, Florida
Age: 34
Recent Market Cap: $296.4 million
Stibel is clearly comfortable at the helm. In 1998, at 25, he became chairman and CEO of Simpli, an Internet search engine that was later acquired by NetZero, an Internet service provider. Stibel remained with the outfit until August 2005, when he joined Interland, a Web site hosting company for small and medium-sized businesses. Within a year of his ascent, Stibel had doubled the value of the company’s stock and helped it achieve organic growth. In March 2006, the firm renamed itself Web.com, a URL it had acquired the previous December. In September 2007, it merged with Website Pros. Perhaps Stibel’s understanding of his role in Web-based businesses can be ascribed to his innate grasp of the human brain: He earned degrees in philosophy, psychology and cognitive science from Tufts and a master’s in brain science from Brown.
Benjamin Sun
Title: President and CEO, Community Connect
City: New York
Age: 34
Recent Market Cap: Privately Held
Sun cofounded Community Connect, which links Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Hispanics, in a Manhattan apartment in 1996. He certainly knows the market — he grew up in Queens, one of the most diverse places in America. Sun has raised more than $20 million from such investors as Comcast and Sandler Capital; according to Comscore, Community Connect’s sites — AsianAve.com, BlackPlanet.com, MiGente.com, Faithbase.com and Glee.com — collectively generate more than 500 million page views a month. Before starting Community Connect, Sun, a University of Michigan graduate, worked in Merrill Lynch’s Technology Investment Banking Group, where he was involved in numerous corporate-finance and M&A transactions in the technology industry.
Peter J. Ungaro Title: President and CEO, Cray
City: Seattle
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $149 million
“I want Cray to continue to be known for producing the supercomputers that enable the scientific breakthroughs and industry advances that change society,” says Ungaro, a former IBM executive who became CEO of this mature company in August 2005.
It’s understandable that he would feel that way: In the ’70s and ’80s, Cray, whose largest customer is the federal government, was the “it” supercomputer. But then IBM and Hewlett-Packard moved into the space, and Cray foundered. When Ungaro came onboard, he made it his mission to go back in time — or to where Cray had been perched 20 years ago, at least. His efforts have worked: In November 2006, the company was awarded $250 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop a new supercomputer that integrates a range of processing technologies into a single platform. The company has also signed a host of deals over the past year, including large system contracts with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.
Ungaro isn’t surprised. “The Cray brand is powerful,” he says, “synonymous with tackling the most computationally complex problems and conducting the most important science of our time at the most respected research centers in the world.”
Mark Vadon
Title: Executive Chairman, Blue Nile
City: Seattle
Age: 38
Recent Market Cap: $700 million
Vadon’s business was built on love — literally. In 1998, soon to propose to his girlfriend, he strolled into Tiffany’s in San Francisco to shop for a ring. He was dressed like a college student (he had graduated from Stanford B-school two years earlier and was, at the time, consulting for Bain), and the salespeople, unimpressed, ignored him. Annoyed, he left.
Later that day he discovered a Web site called Internet Diamonds. He bought a ring there — and a year later, he bought the company. Since then, Blue Nile, as he renamed it, has grown to $319 million in sales — 100 percent online. Under Vadon’s watch, its 2007 sales jumped 27 percent, while profits rose 33 percent. Although 2008 has gotten off to a slow start, Vadon, who holds a B.A. in social studies from Harvard, remains optimistic.
He tries to stays in touch with customers on a regular basis, reviewing calls, e-mails and general feedback. “I’m inspired by their desire for education and guidance and am continually amazed at the satisfaction they receive from making a smarter, more informed purchase,” he says.
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Scot T. Wetzel
Title: President AND CEO, United Western Bancorp
City: Denver
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $138 million
A third-generation banker, Wetzel has been at the helm of UWB — one of Denver’s largest banks, with $2.2 billion in assets — since December 2005. A Denison University graduate, he was previously president of Compass Bancshares’ Colorado operations and senior vice president for KeyBank in Colorado. In 2005, he led Matrix Bancorp’s recapitalization and transition into United Western. In the fourth quarter of 2007, UWB reported $3 million in income.
Jerry Yang
Title: Founder and CEO, Yahoo
City: Sunnyvale, California
Age: 39
Recent Market Cap: $38 billion
The famous Yahoo cofounder, a Taiwanese immigrant who arrived in California at age 10, has been holding onto his empire with an iron fist. Yang, whose net worth hovers around $2.2 billion, graduated from Stanford with a B.A. and M.S. in electrical engineering; he met his business partner, David Filo, there. Together, the two turned their Internet project into a popular Web portal, which went public in 1996. Before a little company named Google came along, Yahoo was practically synonymous with the Internet.
Contrary to what one might expect, Yang has said that Microsoft’s bid to purchase the company has motivated him for whatever lies ahead. “The journey has been anything but boring,” he told the New York Times. “We’re on the cusp of something more interesting as we go forward.”
Mark Zuckerberg
Title: Founder and CEO, Facebook
City: Palo Alto, California
Age: 23
Recent Market Cap: Privately held
By now, of course, Zuckerberg’s story is legendary: Raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York, he was enrolled in Harvard’s class of 2006. In 2003, he and some friends created something called Coursematch, which allowed students to view lists of peers enrolled in the same classes. Another project, Facemash.com, was a kind of “Hot or Not?” for Harvard undergrads. The site was not up long before the Harvard administration took it down, later charging Zuckerberg with violating rules on Internet privacy and intellectual property.
He launched Facebook in February 2004; by that summer, it had put down roots on nearly 30 campuses, and Zuckberberg did what every good Web entrepreneur does: He quit school and moved to California.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing; later in 2004, some of his Harvard classmates sued him, claiming he stole their idea, design, business plan and source code for a project called ConnectU. Zuckerberg denied their allegations; the case is pending.
Meanwhile, in October 2007, Microsoft (run by that other famous Harvard dropout), purchased a 1.6 percent share in Facebook for $240 million. According to Comscore, Zuckerberg’s dorm-room special, with 66 million active users, is the sixteenth-most-visited site in the U.S. Who needs a college degree?