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Entrepreneur of the Year: Ping Fu

The Geomagic team-building session ends triumphantly. Employees chatter to each other about their personality types, and the presenter dishes out business cards while basking in the glow of the ovation that, 40 minutes ago, seemed so unlikely. Ping stands in a corner of the room, quietly savoring the moment. "I wanted people to take the test not because of some absolute truth it might reveal, but as a guideline for reducing conflicts," she explains. "If you know that the person working next to you has a different frame of reference, then you might not get so frustrated if you have a problem."

The care with which she planned the company meeting in general, and the Myers-Briggs test in particular, reflects Ping's recent commitment to honing her management skills. "After a decade, I feel like we've got our fundamentals in line," she says. "Our products, our markets, our research and development. Now it's time for me to get better at running the company."

In 1997, Ping left the NCSA to devote her energies to the start-up Geomagic. She borrowed $500,000 from her sister (who had followed Ping to America, and remained under her wing until her marriage to a successful businessman in Phoenix), then traveled to Chicago and wowed an audience of venture capitalists. They invested $1.5 million in Geomagic.

Still, the mechanics of running a company seemed daunting. That feeling is common among engineers and scientists founding start-ups and, like many technologists before and since, Ping hired an experienced chief executive. At the same time, she decided to relocate Geomagic near a university where her husband could teach and continue his research. (Edelsbrunner serves on Geomagic's board, and generates the mathematical theories driving the company's products, but is removed from day-to-day business.) Every major research school in the U.S. was eager to hire Edelsbrunner. He and Ping chose Duke.

In 1999, shortly after the move, Ping made a pitch to Franklin Street Partners, a group of RTP-area investors. "She came across as extremely intelligent and prepared, and communicated her vision of the company in a gripping manner," recalls Paul Rizzo, former vice chairman of the board at IBM and emeritus dean of the business school at the University of North Carolina, who was present at the meeting and now sits on Geomagic's board. "You could tell she had a strong intuitive sense about what she was doing. And the technology she was talking about was just so interesting that it seemed like it couldn't fail."

Franklin Street invested $6.5 million in the seemingly sure bet, and yet failure very nearly descended. The CEO that Ping had hired had an impressive track record at a large tech company, but had no experience with a small start-up. He spent most of Geomagic's capital and brought in virtually no revenue. His salespeople put up goose eggs.

"A slow start was pretty much in the cards," Rizzo points out. "Geomagic was introducing what amounted to a brand-new technology. They had to build a market at the same time that they were building a brand."

The second year turned out to be as dry as the first. By the end of 2000 the money was gone, the tech bubble had burst, and the company still had virtually zero revenue. Ping went to her Franklin Street investors and told them that she wanted to take the reins of the company. It was their money and her family's money that had disappeared, she said, and her employees whose futures were at risk.

Franklin Street agreed to Ping's emergency business plan, and she went to talk to her people. The CEO resigned and the salespeople left. (To pay their severance packages, she mortgaged her house.) She asked her remaining employees to give her three months to turn Geomagic around. If she failed, she would sell the company and try to help them all keep their jobs.

"I must admit I had my doubts," Rob Black recalls. "If it had been any other boss but Ping, I probably would have bailed. But she communicated such a sense of resolve that I just couldn't help believing in her. Thank goodness I decided to stay."

Ping went into survival mode, a state of mind and being she had developed all too well during her childhood in China. "All of my instincts kicked in," she says. "In a crisis mode, you lose all self-doubt--at least I do. I couldn't afford the luxury of doubt. I had too many people depending on me. I knew I had to make Geomagic's story so compelling that no potential customer could possibly turn me down."

Desperation turned out to be the mother of invention: Ping made a $1.8 million sale to Align Technology (in fairness, the former CEO had established the groundwork for the sale), and convinced customers in the dental tech industry that DSSP could deliver a new age of custom-fit crowns and implants. She decided not to assemble an in-house sales staff, relying instead on resellers, particularly laser-scanner and processor manufacturers. Within the promised three months, Ping had stabilized Geomagic, and within a year the company was showing a profit.