7. Victoria Ransom
The blonde New Zealander founded Wildfire in 2008, which was primarily a travel and adventure company. The Harvard MBA graduate has turned Wildfire, their social marketing startup, to nearly 400 people, 21,000 clients, and had become closely tied with Facebook. After a short stint on Wall Street, where she worked as media analyst for Morgan Stanley, Ransom struck out on her own. "Going through round after round of layoffs, I decided that there had to be something better in life," she says. In 2001, she was planning a vacation, searching the Web for surf camps that offered a way to explore the country she'd be visiting. Finding none, she and Chuard— then an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney— decided to start their own travel company, focusing on snowboarding and other activities they loved.
