WaterHealth's early attempts faltered because it tried to sell a device rather than a service, says Addy, who joined the Irvine, California, company in 2004 after his venture firm invested $2 million in it. But Addy, a native of Ghana who had grown up standing in line at the water pump in Accra, knew there was a market for clean water.
Under the new approach, Addy partnered with NGOs to educate villagers about the importance of clean water. He built a network of local professionals to service and maintain the equipment. Then he set up a financing structure so that communities that were able to cobble together a 30 percent to 40 percent down payment for a $65,000 unit could pay off the rest in a loan arranged by WaterHealth. By making clean water affordable to families that earn just $2 a day, the company will soon become profitable.
In late September, the company scored $30 million in loan guarantees from Dow Chemical (also one of its investors); the money will make possible 2,000 more centers over the next couple of years.
Perspective Provider of the Year
The word tough is thrown around in business all the time: a tough negotiator, a tough adversary. The word gets overused, so when someone like Dawn Halfaker comes on the scene, you want to stop and say: No, she really is tough.
By now, Halfaker has told the story of June 19, 2004, hundreds of times. She was three years out of West Point, working as a military police officer in Baquba, Iraq, and was on a nighttime patrol. "I was in the first vehicle of the patrol and came around the corner," she says, "and started taking fire and took an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade, through the front of our vehicle. It tore down the side, and tore off one of my squad leaders' arms, and also tore off most of my arm, my shoulder, and did a lot of other damage as well." Halfaker spent 12 arduous months at Walter Reed hospital. She was released in July 2005. She'd assumed her future would be in the military. Now it couldn't be; she couldn't be a soldier without an arm. So: tough. She'd have to find something else to do.
Halfaker began consulting on security projects, and in 2006 incorporated Halfaker & Associates. The pressure of hiring employees, assembling bids for government contracts, and doing most of the actual consulting work was tremendous, but Halfaker was determined not to let the stress show. The employees "just knew they would show up and get paid, and that's all they should be worried about, I think," she says. "It's a very similar model to being in the military. I wasn't always on every mission; I wasn't always with my soldiers; but if I made sure they were fed, happy, well trained, and had the resources to be able to survive combat, then I was doing my job and providing leadership."
Halfaker has 50 employees and expects 2007 revenue to reach $1.4 million; she wants to double the head count and reach $4 million in sales in 2008. Starting next month, she'll expand into the civilian world, selling industrial and physical- security services. You want to tell her that sounds like a tough transition. Then you remember whom you're talking to.
Crusader of the Year
At 43, Dom Meffe Jr. has lived the life of several entrepreneurs--he owned (with his father) 13 Chuck E. Cheese's before turning 30, then ran the Weight-Rite golf-shoe company, then started a pharmacy-claims-processing company, then started a specialty pharmaceutical company. He sold that last company, CuraScripts, for $333 million in 2004, then ran it as a division of its parent company until revenue approached $4 billion.
So what next? Meffe's personal life had been rattled by cancer. His sister had died from a brain tumor, his wife had had a tumor removed, and he had been treated for testicular cancer. When some private equity people he'd worked with approached him about running a company that would work on cancer-diagnosis tools, Meffe jumped. He joined Triad Isotopes as CEO in late 2006.
The company makes nuclear pharmaceuticals, radioactive materials that help with diagnoses and treatments. One highly simplified example: If a doctor can't determine where a patient's infection is coming from, he can send the patient's blood to one of Triad's pharmacies, where pharmacists will tag the white blood cells with a gamma-emitting isotope. The doctor reinjects the treated blood into the body and later takes a photograph with a gamma camera. Because white blood cells attack infections, the gamma camera will pick up where those treated white blood cells have headed: to the kidneys, the liver, wherever, and the source of the infection is revealed. Meffe estimates Triad products will treat 900,000 patients this year.
Meffe's strategy with Triad has been to acquire existing companies, which has led his little Orlando start-up to $120 million in revenue in its first full year. You might think all his experience would make this a breeze, but no. "I'm a lot more experienced now," he says. "Some of the other companies I ran, I wasn't aware of the things we were doing right or aware of the things we needed to do. Now I know, and if I don't get it done, it's frustrating. There's so much to do. So much more to do."
Wunderkind of the Year (Again)
When it comes to Facebook's relationship status, things have been complicated. After rebuffing a billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo in 2006, the company's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, was derided as arrogant and greedy. In 2007, though, he opened the doors of the social network to outside software developers, unleashing a tsunami of new applications and media chatter, and this time it was love.
Love or hate him, Zuckerberg has done a remarkable job of turning a dorm room hacker's project into a business juggernaut and himself into the Web 2.0 poster boy. But Zuckerberg understands the "social graph"--his term for the personal connections Facebook seeks to make use of--because he thrives there in real life. He makes and keeps friends. He seeks and takes good advice. He listens to his staff. The whiteboard geek, who talks a bit like a robot, has earned the affection and respect of a stunning array of VIPs, only some of whom stand to profit from his success. As for the big wave-off, it now looks prescient: When Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) bought a small piece of Facebook in October, the company's value was established at $15 billion.
