Venture capitalist Tim Draper, whose firm has backed such Internet success stories as Hotmail.com and about 40 other trail blazers, spread unconventional wisdom about what it takes to make it big on the Net.
Draper appeared at the Coffee & DoughNets session of the Morino Institute Netpreneur Program, where a packed room of over 350 eagerly hung on his words and peppered him with questions during the session.
Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which Draper founded and where he serves as a managing director, is an early stage venture capital firm with $400 million under management.
"Our job is to act as the head hunter, the investment banker, therapist, business model producer or developer and partner to a very small group of people who are just getting going," Draper explained.
Q. What's a frisbee worth?
A. 45 seconds with Tim Draper.
Three lucky netpreneurs had a chance to deliver their "elevator speeches" before a crowd of over 350 people. Marc Sumerlin pitched Car Street USA, an online market for new car purchases. Frank Llosa described a "411 on steroids." Joel Brody asked for a million bucks for Araby.com, an online trading community.
After a few air horns signaling end of time, the audience was asked to put on their VC hats and vote on who should get funded. Based on the applause, everyone got at least a little money...
Unlike conventional venture capitalists who usually back start-ups once they are up and running, Draper is content to invest in an idea scribbled on a napkin and batted around in an hour-long meeting.
It was in one such meeting that Draper came up with the idea of "viral marketing" for hotmail.com, where the company marketed itself discretely in email messages and which recipients then passed on like a virus.
In one dramatic example, he said, hotmail sent one email message to India and within three weeks had gotten 100,000 registered users for the email service. Eventually the start-up was sold to Microsoft Corp.
Although the session started just after 8 a.m., the room was filled with electricity. Nearly every hand shot up when Draper asked how many considered themselves entrepreneurs.
Talking about what he looks for in a start-up, he listed entrepreneurial drive, strong management, a motivated team, a frugal culture and what he called "one brass ring."
"And that one brass ring might be what Microsoft did with IBM (supplying the PC-DOS operating system) or it might be something where you have a special knowledge that turns out to be really important to a lot of people... For Hotmail, it was viral marketing."
In short, Draper said, his firm is looking for "heroes -- people who are going to change the world." And that takes visionaries, those whose ideas will create companies with billion-dollar valuations and make an investor like Draper perhaps 100-times return on his initial investment.
To get that home run, he's willing to take risks on a flier. "We don't care about what the (profit) margins are now," he said. "In fact, with Internet companies, we don't even care what the margins are in 10 years, but long term, we want those margins to be big and growing."
And that growth is occurring at a faster and faster pace. He pointed out that it took Hewlett-Packard 40 years to reach $1 billion in valuation, Microsoft 15 years, Netscape two years and Yahoo nine months.
Venture capital backing is an important component to those kinds of success stories, and Draper pointed out that the money is available for those who have what a VC wants.
"The amount of money that's going into venture capital continues to go way up and the returns continue to go way up," he said.
So what does Draper look for in a start-up? Here are his Top 10 tips for starting and running a company.
1. "You start with big market." Go after a market in which you can experience hypergrowth.
2. Seek big margins. To get those margins you have to figure out what you're really good at -- what sets you apart from others and makes you unique.
3. People. "You are constantly on the lookout for super heroes," he advised. "Your sole reason to exist is to find people who are smarter than you are."
4. Build market share fast. "Use a virus, use a magnet, use whatever you can to get to be the biggest one, fastest."
5. Form partnerships. "Partner and create a network and then use that network and build that network."
6. Be a winner. "You don't want to be number two. You just don't. And it's really not that much harder to be number one than number two."
7. Get a customer. "A customer is absolutely critical to your success because you need the feedback."
8. Expand. "Then go get another customer so that the first one doesn't own you."
9. Build strategic relationships with these customers. "And strategic relations just means money has to go one way or the other, and it's better to have it go towards you usually."
10. Go public.
Draper sat down with The Chronicle recently to discuss venture capital, the dot-com era, submarines and songwriting, among other things.
Q: So tell us a little bit about your background. Your grandfather had an astonishing career both in public service and in the private sector. And so did your dad.
A: We're not going to discuss genetic dilution or anything are we? (Laughter).
Q: No, we'll leave that for another day.
A: My grandfather (Gen. William Draper Jr.) had a great role in starting venture capital, founding the first venture firm west of the Mississippi. And my father (William Draper III) was also a venture capitalist.
So the last thing I wanted to do was to get into the same business my father and grandfather were in. I wanted to start a business, but when I was coming out of business school, I realized that starting a business was going to be limiting because I had ideas for a thousand different businesses.
One was going to be video on demand, and one was going to be submarines.
Q: Submarines?
A: Making submarines, yeah, so that we could all just kind of go wander around underwater. But then there was this pressure at Harvard Business School to get a regular paying job when you get out.
I think I succumbed to that pressure. That may have been the last time I really succumbed to anybody's peer pressure. So I got a job at Alex. Brown, the investment bank, and worked there doing half venture capital, half investment banking.
I didn't like the investment banking business because I was a game player -- I like games. And I didn't like being in the middle of the game. I was never a very good referee.
Q: Along with being venture capitalists, your father was a high-ranking U. N. official and your grandfather is credited with rebuilding the economies of Japan and Germany under the Marshall Plan. Do you see public service in your future at all?
A: Well, you know what's really interesting is I've weighed that, and at some point, maybe I will do something like that, but I have found that I can have a very large, positive impact on society through my venture capital business.
Q: Can you give us an example?
A: I convinced the founders of (the free e-mail service) Hotmail to put that little message at the bottom of every e-mail. I don't know if you all know the story.
I told them, "You're giving the e-mail away for free, so why not just put a little message at the bottom of everybody's screen so you get this free advertising? It should say: 'P.S. I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail. ' " (Editor's note: This idea was dubbed "viral marketing," and Draper is widely given credit for its invention.)
They fought me about it, and then finally they said OK. The compromise was: "We'll just do 'Get your free e-mail at Hotmail' -- no 'P.S. I love you. ' " Well, it turned out that the little message you could click on and sign up for Hotmail triggered huge growth.
Within three weeks, we had 100,000 registered Hotmail users in India. And we got 11 million users overall in 18 months. So, I look back at that, and I think, "Wow, that made a huge impact on society." Then I started to think, "You know, Hotmail may be one of the best environmental companies that the world has ever known, because you're using no paper and you're using no gasoline. You're not using rubber and you're not cutting down trees, and you're communicating with 300 million people."
I started to think that something like Hotmail made a bigger impact on society than anything I could have done in the public sector.
Q: What's your next world-changing company?
A: Now we've got an investment in Skype (an Internet telephony startup), which allows you to call anybody anywhere in the world.
National boundaries are going to probably dissolve or change. Governments, I think, are going to have to realize that they are competing for people, rather than people sort of sucking up to government.
Q: Now that the major telecoms are getting into Internet telephony, how do you think Skype will be able to compete?
A: I think costs (of major telecoms) are still too high. They're going to have a hard time competing, because Skype is using a peer-to-peer system that uses your computer while you're on the phone.
Most of the other solutions have to go through a central service, and that means you need a lot of big servers. So there's that cost, and then the other big phone companies are going to have trouble just because they're so big.
Q: But Skype's founders, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, are essentially fugitives because of their former company, Kazaa, and the file- sharing lawsuits it spawned. They won't step foot in the United States because of file-sharing suits against them.
A: They'll get a subpoena if they come into this country.
Q: How do you justify that? I mean you're talking about investing some pretty serious money with two guys that are changing their offices every few months to make sure that international authorities don't catch up with them.
A: Yes, this is an entirely different business. These are a couple of extraordinary guys. They created something: peer-to-peer technology that allows people to share files. They created the technology, and then the users went and used it in a lot of different ways.
Some of the ways that people used it were arguably sharing music that the music people would say, "Wait a second, that isn't a fair way to share." That's all being argued in the Supreme Court and whatever. (Editor's note: The Supreme Court is expected to hear a file-sharing case by the end of March.)
Q: Do you have a personal stand on the Kazaa founders' guilt or innocence?
A: Personally, I believe they're completely innocent. They invented something new, and it got used in a whole new way. And it's really no different from the guy who made this (points to a tape recorder).
The tape is used to record music, or for whatever other purpose, and the cases against tape recording were thrown out. And I think sometimes it's hard for big industries to adapt to change as easily as it is for small companies.
It's funny, because the content providers always go through this period where they get all mad, and then they realize that they're actually making more money now.
Q: I want to ask you a little bit about the recent history of the VC business. Venture capital was considered a smart and savvy financial strategy for a long time, and then along came 1998, 1999, and everybody went nuts. If you look back at it now, what happened?
A: Well, it's easy to look back with 20/20 vision. Let me tell you the story this way. Everyone was completely rational at the time, and here's why. There was a new opportunity.
There was this Internet, and it was a whole new way of doing business, and everybody could do business over the Internet, and it made a lot of sense. So there was this excitement around it, and it turned out that people wanted to invest in it. So dollars came more easily.
Money was -- you know, it was a lower cost of capital. Cost of capital was no problem. So, people were investing and almost panicking to get into this new industry.
Q: I'm very interested in the fact that you defend the rationality of the industry. You were once mentioned in an article about the dumbest venture capital deals of the boom times.
A: No, no, it was not the dumbest deals. The story was about the dumbest venture capitalists. I came in second. (Laughs.)
Q: That said, how could one defend the rationality of things like selling pet foods over the Internet? You've been taken to task personally for companies like (Internet service provider) NetZero and (sports equipment marketer) FogDog.com. What was the rationale?
A: You know it's interesting, because NetZero was a huge success. And FogDog was also a huge success -- I mean, a small success. FogDog was a small success, but we actually made money on FogDog.
Q: You mean success for the partners?
A: It was a success all the way across, and it's a part of Global Sports now, and it's grown and it's done very, very well. If you go to FogDog.com right now, it will click you over to Global Sports, and you can buy your sports equipment.
NetZero is now part of United Online. That was an enormous success, and it's been a great competitor to AOL and continues to be quite successful. The business keeps growing. They keep bringing on new subscribers -- so I would say that those two were fine. But we also made other dumb mistakes ...
Q: Such as?
A: (Laughs.) I tend not to like to push down on the guys who've already been beaten up.
Q: You can't mention any?
A: I just don't do that, once they've lost the money, and they've tried as hard as they possibly could, and they've worked and worked, and it just didn't work out. I feel like it's much better just to say, "OK, we'll move on."
Q: Were there any success stories that surprised you? You must have been confronted with some crazy ideas.
A: We've missed some, and those are the ones that hurt the most, because, as you know, this business is really reliant on getting the big winners.
Q: Which ones passed you by?
A: Google and Yahoo.
Q: Ouch.
A: I made Yahoo their first offer. I got outbid by that Sequoia guy (Michael Moritz).
Q: And Google?
A: And Google -- I met one of the guys on an airplane and then the partnership turned it down because we had already seen 20 search engines and we already had invested in six of them.
Q: Which Google guy did you meet?
A: I think it was Sergey (Brin, cofounder of Google).
Q: Were you a believer in what they were saying?
A: I liked it. I thought, "This is interesting," but I knew it was late. I brought it to the partnership, and the partnership turned it down.
Q: The cynical view of the boom and venture capitalists is this: You guys gave money to companies.
In the middle of the hype, the companies went to investment bankers and went public even though they had no profits and scarcely any revenue.
The insiders sold off their shares as soon as they could, so the VCs got rich, the investment bankers got rich, the insiders got rich, and then all the shares ended up in the hands of mom and pop mainstream investors who were retail, not institutional, who got most of the IPO Internet stocks of that period. And they're the ones who rode the stock all the way down.
A: I think that is a cynical view. I think, in general, everybody rode them down.
I think when they went public, that's usually driven by a market. I asked of an investment bank once, "How could you have taken this company public?" and he explained they were already public, which meant the market was ready for them.
Whether it was going to be an enormous success or not was still a risk, but the market was ready. It had a public persona to it, and so the market was ready.
That is the way the investment bankers look at the world -- they need to make sure that there is a buyer at the other end, so that when a company goes public, the buyer is willing and ready to invest.
So that's how those companies would naturally go public. There would be great enthusiasm for investing.
It's almost the opposite for venture capitalists. We are not allowed to participate in the IPO process in any way.
For companies that went public in 2000 or 1999, where most of your concerns are, I believe, the venture capitalists would have been locked up and would not have been able to distribute their stock. That was the case in a lot of our companies.
Q: Where is the industry now, having come out of that whole experience? It's gone through a number of really tough years. To what extent has business recovered and approached some kind of normal cycle?
A: Industry has gone through this cycle before. They did it in biotechnology in 1993. Our business is cyclical, it does go up and down.
That was a boom, and then there was a bust. We'll see booms and busts in the future, and you'll have very similar experiences.
I think we're on the mend now. I think it's a 17-year thing. We're five years into it. Another 12 years, we'll have another boom.
Q: What are the trends right now in terms of the kinds of things people are putting money into? Where is the smart money?
A: Well I wouldn't know about the smart money, right? (Laughs.)
I have been really active in things like peer-to-peer technology. Anything that looks like it's a magnet for customers; anything that looks like it will in some way reach many, many people relatively quickly.
I love that because then the marketing budget doesn't have to be so high, and you can grow your business very effectively.
My partner Steve Jurvetson loves nanotechnology because now you're studying things down to the molecular level, and when you start making changes at the molecular level, new materials, new products, all sorts of things can start to happen. The pants are one example, you spill stuff on the pants, and it falls right off -- nanopants. They're very small. (Laughs.)
The thing that you can do, though, is you can have tires that last forever, for instance. Or you can have a rocket fuel that can take a rocket to the moon without the three stages. Or you can have a material that is much, much lighter, so airplanes don't have to weigh so much.
The first investments we've made have been in memory devices because we think eventually memory will have to be very, very small.
I'll go into one more. My other partner, Raj Atluru, has taken a very active role in alternative energies and clean tech and that kind of world. We often list all the problems in society, and the politicians would make you believe that they're going to solve all those problems.
Generally, I'd say it goes the other way. Businesses solve a lot of the world's problems. The next big energy breakthrough will happen through a business.
The next big environmental breakthrough similarly could happen through a business. Medicine has been advanced through business. It turns out that it's the businesspeople that tend to be the ones who solve all this stuff.
Q: How is the international investing climate right now?
A: We are investing in China. We have a terrific office in China. We're working on an office in India.
We have about seven Chinese investments that all look very promising, and they'll probably go public in four years. There are some great things happening outside of the Silicon Valley.
Q: Has Silicon Valley lost its innovation lead?
A: This is such a great place. All of these people -- we're like the Ellis Island of technology.
They come to the Silicon Valley to start their businesses because they know it's going to be very difficult where they are. So we're going to continually be a great attraction for entrepreneurship. I don't know if it's the majority, but it's a large portion of our capital investment.
Q: Let's talk a little bit about your personality. You showed up at a launch party once wearing a space suit, and a Baman outfit another time. Where does that come from, and why is everyone else so uptight in the business community?
A: I love what I do, and I have fun with it.
I think a lot of people live a little bit in a fear environment, and I think I tend not to. I tend to say, "What the heck? I'll try it. We'll see what happens."
Q: You recently held a stunt where people could teleconference you and give quick pitches. What was that?
A: It was a great way to filter things down and to get a whole bunch of ideas at once. We've had a number of these.
This was an opportunity to have people pitch me from all over the world. We put a blog up and it said, "Pitch Tim Draper on your billion-dollar idea."
We had some great fun with it. We picked 11 ideas, and we invited them all to pitch me from video teleconferencing. It worked unbelievably well. We actually ended up funding one called InterCell.
Q: Are you usually right in your gut feeling on things?
A: Yes, but I have also a very good, really smart partnership. We bang these ideas around like crazy, but I do feel like I'm a gut guy.
Beyond the boardroom
What is your typical day? I get up about 6 a.m., and I go three days a week to play basketball. It's a regular game that the same guys have been going to for a long time. We start off stretching, so we don't hurt ourselves. Other days, I get up about the same time and might have a breakfast with somebody, or sometimes I catch up on my e-mail. Then I go to work, and there's no typical day, and that's what's so great about it. We meet with a whole variety of different people including entrepreneurs we've already funded, limited partners.
When do you call it a day? This is kind of a 24-hour job. All the time, I'm either thinking about it or e-mailing. I usually have dinner and go back to doing e-mail from home. I travel a lot, visiting affiliates. I give a lot of speeches. Those are great magnets for entrepreneurs.
How do you balance family and work? I have a very tolerant wife, and the kids are wonderful. We just work it out.
Books on your bedside table? I've read a wide variety of things. I've read the Koran. I've read the Bible. I read a lot of technical journals, a lot of philosophical things, science fiction and history. I like to get a pulse on the world and understand why it exists the way it exists. The overwhelming amount of reading I do is business plans and e-mails.
Briefcase
Name: Tim Draper
Age: 46
Job: Venture capitalist, founder and managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Menlo Park.
Affiliations: Member of Haas School of Business advisory board; course creator and chairman of BizWorld, a nonprofit organization that teaches children entrepreneurship and business.
Education: Bachelor's of science in electrical engineering, Stanford University; MBA, Harvard Business School.
Family: Wife, Melissa; four children, ages 12-21.
Participating were Business Editor Ken Howe; Deputy Business Editor Alan T. Saracevic; assistant business editors Marcus Chan, David Tong and Sam Zuckerman; reporters Birgitta Forsberg, Jenny Strasburg, Verne Kopytoff, Ben Pimentel, Dan Levy and David Baker; and editorial assistants Steve Corder and Colleen Benson.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Susan Niczowski -- salads industry can make millions
Susan Niczowski is the right example. She made it big in the food industry with ... salads. I personally believe that in 21 century people will crave to live longer and to live healthier, then obviously the fuel for that is good food, fitness life, good medication, non stressful life. So, believe me, if you want to make money, healthy food is a go...od start. Now let's see how she made it.
Anyone can make a salad, but entrepreneur Susan Niczowski has parlayed that simple concept into a thriving, multimillion-dollar gourmet food business.And Summer Fresh Salads Inc. recently expanded its offerings of salads, dips and side dishes to include a new line of specialty soups.
Her strategy targets time-pressed consumers who want the convenience of natural, freshly prepared food. And the recipe for success calls for creating cutting-edge products each season in the same way that the clothing industry does.
"Food is fashion," the 41-year-old said in an interview at her base in the Toronto suburb of Woodbridge.
"We've actually got that trademarked," she added.
"The fashionistas have their runway of clothes each season, and we create excitement in the deli," said Ms. Niczowski, the chief executive officer who is also elegantly attired in a black outfit with a funky, pink broach.
Summer Fresh, which she started in 1991 by selling more refined versions of the ubiquitous potato, macaroni and coleslaw salads, saw its sales mushroom to $38-million last year with 20 per cent coming from the United States. Her main customers include major grocery chains, delis and restaurants.
Tammy Smitham, a spokeswoman for A&P Canada, said the food chain is a big fan of Summer Fresh and has been its customer for 14 years, buying its brand-name dips and salads. "It's the most successful dip we have," she said.
Summer Fresh is "an innovative company," Ms. Smitham said. "They continually come to us with new products and concepts, and they are continually refreshing their product with new labels or new recipes."
Its strength is also its ability to work with customers' ideas, and that is why it has more recently become a private-label maker for A&P's line of Fresh 2 Go soups and side dishes, she added. "They help us develop products that fit our strategy . . . Our tag line is 'We're fresh obsessed.' " The Summer Fresh salad collection today includes more exotic fare, ranging from the popular seven-grain salad and wild rice jubilee, to the latest offerings such as Thai pasta with shrimp and crab, orange pecan slaw, and chicken with cranberries, almonds and red pepper.
"I thought there was a need in the marketplace for fresh prepared foods -- things that you would find in a white-tablecloth restaurant," Ms. Niczowski said.
"Our specialty was salads," she said. "It's simple [to do], but to make them 365 days a year is very hard because you are not always dealing with the same raw materials."
Summer Fresh expanded its menu in 1992 to make ethnic dips such hummus, baba ghanouj and bruschetta. That niche has grown to include a wide range of delicacies from its top-selling artichoke and asiago appetizer to its award-winning roasted red pepper dip.
Her menu recently took on a new twist with a collection of soups with flavours such as Tuscan tomato, butternut squash and broccoli and cheddar that are packaged in plastic, Mason-styled jars.
A busy career woman with a first child who is now 13 months old, Ms. Niczowski identifies with the consumers she is targeting. "Honestly, I don't have the time to go home and peel those potatoes and make that stock from scratch."
Born in Toronto's Downsview suburb, she earned a degree in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Toronto. She worked as a microbiologist at Shopsy's Foods, now part of Maple Leaf Foods Inc., and was involved in quality control for products like wieners and salads.
But she struck out on her own after deciding there was a niche in selling foods to owners of delicatessens. They could reduce labour costs by buying salads from her instead of preparing the food themselves or hiring a chef to do it.
Ms. Niczowski and her mother came up with the first recipes, and they began chopping vegetables in her parents' kitchen. It was not long before she moved to a 3,000-square-foot federally inspected plant, and later expanded to her current 43,500-square-foot facility.
She bankrolled her startup with a $50,000 loan co-signed by her parents, and selling a 50-per-cent stake in her company to the owners of Summersweet Fine Foods Ltd., a pâté maker that was also responsible for delivering her salads.
But she won back total control of Summer Fresh in 1999 after buying the half she did not own "at a huge cost" from Sepp's Gourmet Foods Ltd. of Surrey, B.C., which in the meantime acquired Summersweet. "I didn't want a publicly traded company as a partner," Ms. Niczowski said.
Summer Fresh, which has 220 employees, has a library of more than 3,000 recipes for its products, and also sells prepared foods under private label to big grocery chains.
She acknowledged she has had her share of food "flops," such as a low-fat gelatin in fruit-shaped moulds. The stores snapped them up, but their customers didn't bite. "We had to pull it off the market in six months," she said. "I think it was too far ahead of its time."
But Ms. Niczowski, among 100 women honoured in 2003 and 2004 at the Canada's Most Powerful Women Summit organized by the Toronto-based Women's Executive Network, recalls having a tough time building her business in her salad days.
"It was extremely hard," she said, recalling that male buyers at food shows would often ask to deal with "her boss" instead of her.
"They still do it, even to this day -- especially in the United States," she said.
"I [now] make sure that I have a male sales rep beside me. If they want to think that he's the boss, then that's fine . . . We sell to anybody who pays the bills."
http://www.summerfresh.com/Learn from top women-courage to make big sales
Canada's top women entrepreneurs 2007
All of us can learn from these successful women, some of them are self made, which demonstrate that if you really want you can make it. Next we will analyze some of particular cases to see were it all started and how? the Q is can everyone make it in business and how?
| Rank | Owner | Company | Ticker | Founded | Revenue† | Full-Time Employees | Part-Time Employees | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Rebecca MacDonald | Energy Savings Income Fund | T.SIF.UN | 1997 | 1,532,317,000 | 600 | 600 | |
| 2 | Gabrielle Chevalier | Solutions 2 GO Inc. | 2004 | 270,921,856 | 68 | 0 | ||
| 3 | Madeleine Paquin | Logistec Corp. | T.LGT.A | 1952 | 217,053,000 | 550 | 1,000 | |
| 4 | Janis Grantham | Eagle Professional Resources Inc. | 1996 | 98,115,768 | 985 | 5 | ||
| 5 | Marilyn Sheftel | Silverhill Acura | 1987 | 67,574,621 | 77 | 2 | ||
| 6 | Robin Todd | Marks Supply Inc. | 1962 | 53,172,520 | 175 | 6 | ||
| 7 | Susan Niczowski | Summer Fresh Salads Inc. | 1991 | 43,021,151 | 150 | 0 | ||
| 8 | Lise Watier | Lise Watier Cosmétiques Inc. | 1972 | 39,793,064 | 133 | 72 | ||
| 9 | Shannon Bowen-Smed | BOWEN Workforce Solutions Inc. | 1974 | 37,132,673 | 35 | 0 | ||
| 10 | Margaret Hachey | Duocom Canada Inc. | 1974 | 35,302,966 | 179 | 2 | ||
| 11 | Becky McKinnon | Timothy's Coffees of the World Inc. | 1975 | 32,045,379 | 125 | 25 | ||
| 12 | Teresa Spinelli | Italian Centre Shop Ltd. | 1955 | 25,507,059 | 71 | 83 | ||
| 13 | Arlene Dickinson | Venture Communications Ltd. | 1984 | 24,867,274 | 60 | 0 | ||
| 14 | Fatima Cabral | Pink Elephant Inc. | 1991 | 24,593,493 | 150 | 0 | ||
| 15 | Rossana Di Zio Magnotta | Magnotta Winery Corp. | T.MGN | 1990 | 22,955,623 | 76 | 33 | |
| 16 | Neena Kanwar | KMH Cardiology & Diagnostic Centres | 1988 | 22,809,225 | 126 | 10 | ||
| 17 | Sylvia Vogel | Canderm Pharma Inc. | 1972 | 20,394,663 | 57 | 3 | ||
| 18 | Sylvia Benchimol | Stone-Tile International Inc. | 1991 | 19,830,325 | 90 | 0 | ||
| 19 | Connie Clerici | Closing the Gap Healthcare Group | 1992 | 19,082,103 | 101 | 371 | ||
| 20 | Lee McDonald | Southmedic Inc. | 1983 | 18,002,459 | 100 | 10 | ||
| 21 | Sherri Stevens | Stevens Resource Group Inc. | 1990 | 17,895,412 | 45 | 633 | ||
| 22 | Linda Marie Collier | Tri-ad International Freight Forwarding Ltd. | 1988 | 16,898,000 | 62 | 7 | ||
| 23 | Nancy Adamo | Hockley Valley Resort | 1985 | 16,379,097 | 140 | 145 | ||
| 24 | Kim Beauvais; Mary Marcoccia | M.A.K. Freight Systems (1306243 Ontario Ltd.) | 1998 | 15,369,875 | 17 | 0 | ||
| 25 | Diletta Bello | Bello Metal Recycling Ltd. | 1990 | 14,717,975 | 15 | 1 | ||
| 26 | Eveline Charles | EvelineCharles Salons & Spas (Veraart & Co. Ltd.) | 1984 | 13,959,008 | 200 | 70 | ||
| 27 | Wendy Porter | Endpoint Research | 1990 | 13,878,687 | 75 | 3 | ||
| 28 | Jill Anderson | Aecometric Corp. | 1978 | 13,448,183 | 75 | 0 | ||
| 29 | Manishi Sagar | The Kinderville Group | 1990 | 13,037,288 | 350 | 0 | ||
| 30 | Lakshmi Raj | Replicon Inc. | 1996 | 12,518,036 | 131 | 2 | ||
| 31 | Lily Durepos | Alliance Assurance Inc. / Keal Technology / Broadway Place Ltd. | 1972 | 12,515,520 | 120 | 3 | ||
| 32 | Jean Saunders | Merit Impressions Inc. | 1993 | 12,358,334 | 46 | 2 | ||
| 33 | Marion Witz | Elizabeth Grant International Inc. | 1997 | 11,945,501 | 17 | 50 | ||
| 34 | Joyce Groote | Holey Soles Holdings Ltd. | 2002 | 11,748,351 | 70 | 0 | ||
| 35 | Zoreena Abas | Albert White Technologies | 1936 | 11,278,708 | 30 | 5 | ||
| 36 | Farah Perelmuter | Speakers' Spotlight (Ad-Mar Consulting Ltd.) | 1995 | 10,971,947 | 20 | 0 | ||
| 37 | Anne Tomalin | CanReg Inc. | 1996 | 10,916,615 | 95 | 10 | ||
| 38 | Victoria Sopik | Kids & Company Ltd. | 2002 | 10,532,185 | 280 | 40 | ||
| 39 | Isabel Alexander | Phancorp Inc. | 1989 | 10,489,675 | 11 | 3 | ||
| 40 | Kim McArthur | McArthur & Co. Publishing Ltd. | 1998 | 10,426,123 | 6 | 14 | ||
| 41 | Viive Tamm | Tamm Communications Inc. | 1998 | 10,371,606 | 20 | 3 | ||
| 42 | Verna Alford | Alford Floors & Interiors (1967) Ltd. | 1967 | 9,755,224 | 48 | 5 | ||
| 43 | Johanne Bourque | Gestion Jardin de Ville Inc. | 1956 | 9,683,386 | 25 | 33 | ||
| 44 | Lynn Hazlett | Primex Customs & Logistics Inc. | 2000 | 9,623,643 | 35 | 32 | ||
| 45 | Jane Gowing | Gowing Contractors Ltd. | 1998 | 9,613,825 | 32 | 1 | ||
| 46 | Kim Weimer | Fastener Warehouse Ltd. | 1984 | 9,595,525 | 30 | 6 | ||
| 47 | Margaret Skinner | West Central Pelleting Ltd. | 1996 | 9,495,970 | 26 | 4 | ||
| 48 | Dawna Henderson | henderson bas | 1999 | 9,386,843 | 65 | 0 | ||
| 49 | Gloria Palcich | Optionelle (Underlines Inc.) | 1982 | 9,219,182 | 32 | 8 | ||
| 50 | Marla Kott; Ellen Flanders; Kristin McMillan | Imprint Plus (Illen Products Ltd.) | 1982 | 8,520,122 | 65 | 10 |
All of us can learn from these successful women, some of them are self made, which demonstrate that if you really want you can make it. Next we will analyze some of particular cases to see were it all started and how? the Q is can everyone make it in business and how?
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