10.Zhang Xin

Name: Zhang Xin

Company: SOHO China

Age: 46

Zhang Xin was working as a warehouse employee in Hong Kong when a childhood friend from her hometown, Beijing, visited. "It turned my whole world upside down," Zhang told The New Yorker in 2008. Her friend could speak English, was attending college, and suggested Zhang come to America. Instead, she moved to London, learned English, and received a scholarship to the University of Sussex -- and ended up at Goldman Sachs by 1993, only to leave one year later.
Tired of the fast-paced, investment banking life, Zhang returned to China and interviewed with a real estate developer, Vantone. There, she met Pan Shiyi. He proposed four days later. In 1994, the two married and went on to start their own real estate development company, Hongshi, which was soon after renamed SOHO China. Seventeen years later, the company is Beijing's largest real estate developer.
Pan Shiyi was her co-CEO until Zhang, 46, took the reigns in 2004. Under her leadership, the company went public in 2007 and raised about $1.9 billion. Last year, the company reached $2.8 billion in sales.
SOHO China buildings have a very distinct style. Three SOHO China projects --Galaxy SOHO and Wangjing SOHO in Beijing and Hongqiao SOHO in Shanghai --are designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, the London-based firm whose founder specializes in modern, parametric architecture. "We didn't start off trying to build a brand," Zhang told China International Business last January. "But I am very aware of architecture as a cultural element of a country."
Zhang and her husband are know for more than the monstrous buildings they've developed throughout China; their inclination toward the avant-garde is often echoed in her personal life: the two are known for their glamorous parties and famous friends.
Despite talk of a real estate bubble in China's large cities, Zhang remains optimistic about her home country's prospects. A few months ago, SOHO acquired Jiarui International Plaza, renamed SOHO Zhongshang Plaza, for approximately $296 million -- this is SOHO China's ninth acquisition in Shanghai within the last two years. The company is also constructing a new 50,000 square meter project in Beijing -- Galaxy SOHO -- that is slated for completion by 2012.
"In China, you know, matter what industry you're in, you're able to just put your thoughts into it, try something new, because nothing was there," she told Charlie Rose in a July interview. "So still even -- you know... it still feels like anything is possible."

9.Carol Reeves

Name: Carol Reeves

Company: University of Arkansas' Sam M. Walton College of Business

Age: 53

Carol Reeves is to business-plan competitions what Joe Paterno is to college football: A winning coach who inspires her teams, expects excellence, and keeps students focused on the big picture.
Reeves, 53, is an associate professor of management at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas and a seasoned adviser to student-run companies. With the proliferation of lucrative business-plan competitions such as the annual contest hosted by Rice University, Reeves' services have never been more in demand.
Her most recent success story: BiologicsMD, which produces a drug that battles osteoporosis. Michael Thomas, Robyn Goforth, Misty Stevens, and Paul Mlakar, Jr., met in the New Venture Development class at the University of Arkansas and formed the company as part of a class project -- a foursome Reeves calls a dream team because they each brought a different expertise to the table. Goforth and Stevens provide the scientific background--the two boast PhDs in Chemistry and Biology, respectively. Mlakar, a West Point grad, previously led a privately-held construction company from zero to $22 million in a few years; he acts as Biologics' CEO. And CMO Thomas is very familiar with consumer marketing, seeing as he is a National Account Manager at Colgate-Palmolive.
Biologics went on to win the 2010 Rice contest, which carried with it about $420,000 in prize money. While other teams presented a medical device that can assess and quantify hand strength and a drug delivery device that mixes and injects freeze-dried medication, Biologics wowed the judges--and Reeves--with its scientific prowess. "I couldn't even spell the words of the questions [the judges] were asking because it was such high level science," Reeves jokes, "Robyn and Misty knew it forwards and backwards, so they could answer any scientific question."
Reeves boasts, "We've averaged one startup a year for the last six years. For Arkansas, that's a big deal." BiologicsMD won five competitions in 2010 and earned over $630,000 in cash, prizes, and investments under Reeves leadership. It's now a grownup company, as Reeves calls it, smoothly transitioning from class project to real-life startup. Earlier this year, BiologicsMD was awarded $2.3 million from the Department of Defense.
Reeves is a big supporter of bringing together students with different specialties. In 2006, she developed a Graduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship program for non-business majors. Her class pairs students with one another to create start-up business plans. The students then present those plans at various competitions.
A pro on the subject, Reeves advises fledgling entrepreneurs: "Get ready to work very hard. It's not very glamorous, but you will be amazed how much you can get accomplished if you work hard." Also, Reeves emphasizes that you must know your industry. "Make sure there's a really big pain out there." She continues to mold students into brilliant entrepreneurs, hoping to not only help Arkansas' economy, but America's. "I think if we encourage entrepreneurship, we can do great things." And if Reeves star-studded teams aren't enough to bolster her argument, I'm not sure what is.

8.Sue Chen

Name: Sue Chen

Company: Nova Ortho-Med

Age: 41

Sue Chen is on a mission to revolutionize and transform ambulatory products --a dull term used to describe a dull category of products: Walkers, canes and other devices that help older and infirmed people get around. But Chen's Nova Ortho-Med is making walkers, well, just a little bit racy.
Founded in 1993, Nova Ortho-Med launched a product called Voyager, which Chen billed as a "Ferrari Red" four-wheeled walker in 1995. The company has since introduced a variety of fairly stylish canes, crutches, cushions and items for bathroom safety. The different lines of walkers have zesty names like the "Zoom series" and the "Getgo series" -- perfect for aging Baby Boomers who don't want to be thought of as oldsters. "No one looks forward to the day they have physical issues. It's important to know that you have options," says Chen, 41.
Chen's inspiration was her father. A physician in his native Taiwan, Bruce Chen moved his family to the United States when Sue was just four. He had hoped to become a famous surgeon but found work as a physical rehabilitation physician. "It's not glamorous," says Chen. "There's little innovation. My father would ask, `Why isn't more money, time, and thought put into medical equipment to help people move better?'" He lost a battle with cancer when Chen was just fourteen, right as her uncles were beginning to build a manufacturing company.
After graduating from Trinity College in 1992, Chen moved to California -- without a plan. She then remembered her father's dream and, with the support of her uncles' manufacturing company, she founded Nova Ortho-Med when she was just 23 years old.
Chen started safe, because it was a "male dominated space in an industry that was heavily controlled by insurance and Medicare." Intimidated, her products resembled every one else's. But it was when she met a customer -- a sassy, spicy woman -- that she looked at her and then looked at the walker. "I thought, `This does not go.'" It was that woman, and Chen's affinity for shiny red cars and toenails, that inspired the Voyager.
Despite the company's successes -- its sales last year topped $25.6 million -- Nova Ortho-Med has had to deal with the kinds of challenges and issues that come with being a health-products provider. Four years ago, Chen and her team faced a huge consumer-filed lawsuit. According to Chen, a customer injured himself while using one of the company's products, and the injury led to his death. The lawsuit was settled, when, says Chen, it was discovered that "our product did not cause his fall." But the entire situation, "really broke my heart," she recalls.
It turned out to be a huge turning point. "Being at that bottom point -- questioning every motive I've ever had in running this company that I love so much -- made me realize how much I do love what we do. It completely renewed our mission." The company rebranded and revisited many of the warning labels on their products. "There is nothing that is worse then compromising the quality of the safety of your product."
With a new line of glamour bags that incorporate "current, fun, timeless styles," Chen continues to inspire mobility makeovers. "Dealing with an aging parent, dealing with a debilitating disease, dealing with the discrimination of being in a wheelchair," shouldn't be your identity, she emphasizes. She acknowledges that she can't change the denial aspect of the industry, but she can help make her customers' lives better.
"I'm not just building a company anymore; I'm not just making grandma hot here and there. It's time for somebody -- and it's going to be a woman -- to transform the industry." Nova Ortho-Med's 2010 revenue was $24.7 million -- and that number's expected to grow even more in 2011. Next time you see a colorful cane or patterned walker purse at a mom and pop medical stores, CVS, or on Amazon.com -- just a few of the many suppliers Nova Ortho-Med works with -- or a woman running after a man with a tennis ball-clad walker, don't be alarmed. It's just Sue Chen. "I get to live out my father's dream. And I get to improve peoples' lives. That's the ultimate American dream."

7.Sandy Kurtzig

Name: Sandy Kurtzig

Company: Kenandy

Age: 64

 

Sandra Kurtzig is, in many ways, typical of today's Silicon Valley founders: She's ambitious, she's a repeat entrepreneur, and her business software company, Kenandy, is capitalizing on a hot tech trend (software delivered over the `Net). But there's one thing that separates Kurtzig from the generally youthful pack: She's 64 years old.

If Kurtzig's name rings a bell it might be because she was a Valley pioneer in a different era. In 1972, she started ASK Group Inc. (formerly Ask Computer Systems), a groundbreaking maker of manufacturing-management software that became the first female-founded company to go public. (It did so in 1981). Kurtzig left the company in 1985--citing the desire to spend more time with her family. When her successor didn't work out, she returned to run the company for a few more years before retiring from ASK for good in 1991. The company was acquired by Computer Associates (now CA Technologies) in 1994.
Kurtzig filled her retirement days with projects, including a 5-year stint as the general contractor on her house on the Kohala Coast on the Big Island of Hawaii. She was without a project when her neighbor, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, suggested that Kurtzig say goodbye to her cushy Hawaiian digs and relocate to Silicon Valley to work on a manufacturing management software that could be sold as a service. "I know you're big and overbearing," she told Benioff, who helped evangelize so-called cloud computing. "But I'm retired. Did you forget?" Still, the rush that accompanied the new challenge attracted Kurtzig's inner adventurer -- and she bit. She worked on the Kenandy product, funding all the development herself, in hiding for 18 months before unveiling the company at Salesforce's annual Dreamforce conference for Cloud-focused companies on September 1.
The first time Kurtzig started a company, she wasn't quite so fearless and unhesitating. She was a 24-year old working at General Electric selling computer timesharing devices when she received a call in 1971 from a guy named Larry Whitaker whose company, Halcyon Communications, needed a custom computing program to handle his company's start-up manufacturing operations.
The idea of leaving her secure GE job was frightening. "In 1971 the man leaving a corporation to start his own company was often the black sheep... and the woman starting her own company was considered a pariah, a piranha, or both," she recounts in her autobiography, CEO: building a $400 million company from the ground up.
Nevertheless, Kurtzig pushed ahead and, with a $2,000 commission check from GE and a $300 check from Halycon, she founded ASK in a spare bedroom of her Mountain View, Calif., apartment. (ASK stands for she and her sons -- Andy, Sandra, and Ken.) The company's Manman enterprise software was a hit, and by the time Kurtzig retired ASK had annual sales of more than $450 million.
Along the way she raised two sons who have gone on to become CEOs themselves. Andy, 38, is the founder and CEO of JustAnswer Corp, a website that provides answers to users' questions through its network of experts, and Ken, 35, is the founder and CEO of iReuse LLC, a sustainability consulting and software company. The young men regularly ask their mother for advice. "Do you want me to answer this as a mother or as a business person?" Kurtzig will reply. "As your mother, it's a fabulous idea. As a businessperson, it's pretty bad." She adds: "I'm very proud of them and they're equally proud of me."
Her sons aren't the only folks in Silicon Valley who admire Kurtzig's business expertise. When Kurtzig finished building a prototype of Kenandy's software she had little trouble finding backing. She met with Kleiner Perkins partner and former Oracle president Ray Lane, who persuaded the venture firm to invest in Kenandy. (The name is a combination of her two sons, Ken and Andy.) The company has raised $10.5 million in early round funding.
That's a big change from the early days of ASK. Nowadays, she says, "it's a different game." And this time, Kurtzig is playing by her own set of rules.

6.Lynn Jurich

Name: Lynn Jurich

Company: SunRun

Age: 32

Lynn Jurich doesn't regret her time as an associate at Silicon Valley venture capital firm Summit Partners. It was there, after all, that she met Brad Murray, a fellow Summit employee she married in 2007. And it was while vetting startups at Summit that she realized she had the creativity, intelligence, and risk threshold to be an entrepreneur herself. "Hey, they're not any better than I am."
With an entrepreneurial spirit but no specific plan, Jurich left Summit and began at Stanford Business School in 2005. While there, classmate Ed Fenster approached her with a new idea. He noticed that solar energy was finally getting cost competitive and suggested the two create a business model solution.
They researched around and came across a `solar as a service' business model that commercial office buildings used: Solar developers built panels on the roofs of office towers, and signed the building owners to long-term maintenance and power-supply contracts.
Jurich and Fenster adapted this business model for the consumer market. They put in some of their own money, raised about $3 million in angel investments, and began developing SunRun as second year business students. "We would have to skip class and take meetings. It was one of those stories where we barely graduated because we were working fulltime," recalls Jurich. In 2007, SunRun launched its first solar financing plan.
In the fall of 2008, as Wall Street took a dive for the worse, Jurich was sure her company -- still in its infancy -- would, too. Yet that November, SunRun closed its first fund with U.S. Bank, who gave the company $40 million. In the past four years, Jurich and Fenster have raised financing for $750 million in solar systems, plus $85 million in venture capital. The company will more than double this year in terms of revenue and customers. SunRun currently installs about $365 million worth of equipment per year; Jurich hopes to install $1 billion dollars worth of solar equipment per year in the near future.
Customers sign 20-year agreements with SunRun. The service is only available in nine states right now. In order to make switching to solar as easy as switching from one utility to another, Jurich and her team have to make sure solar power is competitive in the specified area. Customers then pay SunRun a low monthly fee for solar power, which is typically less or even with what they're paying the normal utility company, according to Jurich. They're then locked into that price for the next 20 years.
Though always business oriented -- she wrote an essay in 3rd grade about how Christmas helped retail sales -- Jurich credits her husband with helping her get SunRun off the ground. The two had been married for less than a year when Jurich founded SunRun. "We said, `Why don't we approach our marriage like a portfolio? One of us will go really high risk and one of us will go safe," she explains. Murray went into private equity so that his wife could start her own company.
Now that SunRun is stable and successful, Jurich's husband is launching his own venture called Tatcha -- a skincare line. "We're kind of a gender role reversal in terms of industry," laughs Jurich. His support was essential -- especially when many of her classmates scoffed at she and Fenster's business idea. "But here we are today, with very few competitors after four years."

5.Arianna Huffington

Name: Arianna Huffington

Company: The Huffington Post

Age: 61

In 2005, two years after a failed run for Governor of California (she lost to Arnold Schwarzenegger), Arianna Huffington sought a new challenge. Huffington, whose wit, intelligence and charisma had made her a sought-after pundit on political talk shows, realized the civic "conversation was moving online. People had relevant things to say... and they weren't alone in saying them," she tells Fortune.
That year, she and Kenneth Lerer, an angel investor, former AOL Time Warner executive and founding partner of media firm Robinson, Lerer, and Montgomery, launched The Huffington Post. She says: "We wanted to open up the conversation and elevate blogging."
Starting with only six employees, the website aggregated other sites' content -- much to the chagrin of media traditionalists -- and also produced its own. The Huffington Post has grown immensely since; in early January, the site attracted 28 million unique visitors. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong took notice and, in an attempt to redirect and bolster his company's struggling brand, purchased The Huffington Post for $315 million.
Huffington famously signed the deal during halftime of the 2011 Superbowl, converting her once small, privately owned company into a large, publically traded one. She also became the editor-and-chief and president of the newly created Huffington Post Media Group, putting her in charge of all AOL owned media outlets.
Going corporate has increased Huffington's media clout -- so much so that Bluewater Comics, an independent publisher of graphic novels and comic books, features Huffington's story in its Female Force series. "It's flattering," Huffington says. "It's about not giving up... a message for young women that life is never linear. You should never get discouraged."
Her two daughters, Christina and Isabella, are very sweet about all the power talk, she says. "I've worked all their lives. It's always been a juggling act. But the most important thing is them." Huffington's own mother was her greatest mentor. "She was the central figure in terms of everything I tried to do," says Huffington.
In 2000, when her mother died, Huffington wrote, "There was a magnificence in the way she approached everything in her life. Especially her role as mother. She brought me up to believe that there was nothing I should be afraid to try while at the same time making it clear that she would love me not one iota less if I failed."
Huffington's mother may have taught her to be fearless, but that doesn't mean the media maven is a stranger to failure. She's written and spoken about her many defeats -- including the time her first book was rejected by more than two-dozen publishers. "Failure is a stepping stone to success," Huffington emphasizes.
This type of unshakable optimism keeps the media executive afloat amidst rumors about AOL's uncertain future. "This is the Golden Age of quality and growth for The Huffington Post. The rumors circulating don't affect media," she claims. With a large budget and lots of runway, Huffington is less focused on the future of AOL and more focused on seeing through her goals of expanding The Huffington Post locally and globally. She's launched branches in Canada and the UK, created several new pages such as "Women" and "Black Voices," and continues to work toward future partnerships with various countries. (When we met she was about to leave for Brazil.)
The Huffington Post has been "blessed with everything that has happened so far," says Huffington. AOL provided HuffPost with the assistance it needed to see out its vision. "It was like in a fairy tale. You know, when the helpful animals come along."
Huffington may be as charming as the princess in one of those fairy tales, but she is not a damsel in distress. If her animal friends fall ill, it is doubtful she will stick around. Yet, no matter the ending, it's a safe bet that Arianna Huffington will survive.

4.Demet Mutlu

Name: Demet Mutlu

Company: Trendyol

Age: 30

Demet Mutlu takes multitasking to new heights. Mutlu, 30, is an investor in Doktorsitesi.com, a Turkish medical portal with one million members, and Peak Games, a social gaming company in Turkey and the Middle East with 15 million active users. She's also the founder of Trendyol, a thriving 19-month-old Turkish e-commerce company that itself is an exercise in multitasking: In addition to an online store that attracts 12 million visitors a month, the company operates a fast-fashion clothing line called Milla.
Her juggling act appears to be paying off: Trendyol has raised more than $50 million in capital from investors like Tiger Global and Kleiner Perkins -- the firm's first investment in Turkey.
Still, Mutlu manages to find time to answer customers' emails, part of an overall effort by Trendyol to stay connected with consumers--a practice that not only helps ensure repeat business but also helps the company forecast demand. Here's how: Mutlu and her team post designs by Milla, the website's fashion line, on their Facebook fan page and on Trendyol's website. Customers can then vote on their favorite designs and the winners are the items that appear in the Milla collection each month. This type of concept is great for production, because it's based entirely on demand, says Mutlu.
For Mutlu, who started Trendyol while still at Harvard Business School and left the MBA program to work on the company full time, Trendyol is a labor of love. "When I talk about Trendyol, my employees say they see the spark in my eye. That's really why they accepted the offer [to work here]. They see that excitement and passion and they want to join the company," she says.
Born in New York, Mutlu was raised in the states, the UK, and Turkey -- and went to high school in Italy. She believes experiencing these varying cultures has benefited her in business. "In entrepreneurship, you have to have the right ingredients," says Mutlu. "I've built my finance skills, I've built my ability to raise funding from VCs, my ability to understand consumers, my ability to manage people, the ability to write a business plan, the ability to understand operations, to build a supply chain." Since businesses that scale fast are rather complicated, all these skills come into play. "Though our business looks glamorous from the outside, it's really, really difficult."
That isn't going to stop Mutlu from moving ahead with plans to expand internationally--a big challenge, but from the looks of it, nothing a globetrotting multitasker like Mutlu can't handle.