Mark Cuban Owner, the Dallas Mavericks; chairman, president and cofounder HDNet
1970 "When I was 12, I sold garbage bags door to door. I learned a crucial lesson: If I was nice to people and could save them time, they would make me money in return."
1978 Sneaks into MBA classes while an undergrad at U of Indiana. Busted by dean and banned from MBA courses. Spends remaining college years partying.
1981 After graduation, takes a job as a software salesman. "I got fired after nine months because one day I told the president I needed to call on a customer; he wanted me to sweep the floor. This guy spent his whole day playing president while Rome burned. He refused to go out and sell."
1982 Founds MicroSolutions, a systems-integration company. "I had nothing to lose. I could always get a job as a bartender, so why not go for it?"
1982-90 MicroSolutions makes the Inc. 500 four years in a row. Cuban loses a multitude of love interests due primarily to work-related demands. "I discovered that if I really put myself in the customers' shoes, I could anticipate their needs and determine which technology would give them a competitive advantage."
1995 Receives an unsolicited call from a consultant asking if he would be interested in selling MicroSolutions. Eight months later, Compu-Serve buys it for an undisclosed - but, um, large - amount.
1991-1995 "I moved to LA, took acting classes. I lived on the beach and never expected to go back to work."
1995 One day Cuban's friend Todd Wagner wonders out loud, "Why can't we listen to Hoosiers basketball over the Internet?" The concept for their web broadcasting network, Broadcast.com, is born.
1999 Yahoo! buys Broadcast.com for $5.8 billion.
2000-2001 Cuban founds HDNet, an all- high-definition DirecTV network. The Mavericks are in the playoffs for the first time in 11 years. Cuban attends Dallas Mavericks season opener. Noting lackluster atmosphere in the arena, he decides to buy franchise. Cost: $280 million. "The team was down for 11 years. I figured there was only one direction it could go and that it would be fun to take it there!"
Margot Fraser Founder and chairman, Birkenstock USA
1945 At age 15, living in Bremen, Germany, Fraser takes her first stab at entrepreneurship, making dresses in exchange for butter and eggs. "I had just read a book called Der Deutscher Kaufmann in Übersee [The German Merchant Overseas], and I wanted to be one of those merchants. I thought it would be a great way to wipe out the bad name of Germans the Nazis had created."
1949 Fraser drops out of an arts school, the Kunstchule Bremen, to open her own dressmaking studio.
1952-1960 Emigrates by boat to Toronto, Canada, where she makes dresses, first for a private tailor, then for large fashion houses. "We arrived in Halifax in January, in the middle of a snowstorm. All I could see around the boat was white. It was beautiful." Soon after, she moves to Santa Cruz, California.
1966 While Fraser vacations at a Bavaria spa, a yoga teacher recommends cork-soled Birkenstock sandals for Fraser's feet, which have been beat up over the years, first from bad shoes during WWII, then by standing all day as a dressmaker. "Within two months, my hammer toes had straightened out."
1967 Fraser orders a shipment of Birkenstock sandals and tries to sell them through a Santa Cruz shoe store, Jackson's Bootery. "I walked in with my sandals and then walked out two minutes later. Mr. Jackson said, 'Women will never wear those shoes.'"
1967 Fraser attends a national conference of health food store workers in San Francisco and displays her wares on a red tablecloth. San Rafael health food store owner June Embury is the big buyer: five pairs. "That's where it started."
1972 Fraser and Embury, now her best customer, team up to launch the business. She secures a $6,000 dollar line of credit, with no business plan or revenue timetable. They do $125,000 in revenue the first year. "At that time, a single woman couldn't even get credit to buy gasoline. I had to team up with my married friend to borrow money."
1982 Birkenstock Footprint Sandals is formally incorporated, a separate entity from the German original but selling the same, imported product. "Our customers were young people who were anti-establishment, and who didn't want to look like their mothers. But many of them were living with their mothers, and soon, their mothers said, 'I'd like to be comfortable, too,' and they bought Birkenstocks. It was a 'trickle up' effect."
1988 Birkenstock lands the Nordstrom account, the first major department store to carry the brand.
1991 One million pairs of Birkenstock sandals are sold in the United States.
1992 Fraser moves the company to its current 94-acre property in Novato, California. Sales: $55 million. "We have never taken any outside investment, other than bank credit. The business grew out of our own funds. The growth was slow, but it was the way we wanted to do it."
1997 Fraser sells 40 percent of the company to her 189 employees. She's inducted into the Footwear Hall of Fame, joining the likes of Kenneth Cole and Fiamma Ferregamo.
2001 Hands over the reins to Matt Endriss, who joined the company in 1979 as a warehouse worker. Fraser retains her post as chairman of the board of directors.
2002 Fraser sells the remainder of her ownership to the 252 Birkenstock Footprint Sandals employees.
Phylis Esposito Chief strategy officer, Ameritrade
1969-1972 After a high school job tracking grocery orders at an A&P warehouse, Esposito moves into the supermarket's accounting department while attending college. "I learned that the fun and glamorous things in business don't get done unless the less-glamorous things get done."
1973 Graduates from Fordham University. Proceeds to Columbia Business School.
1975 Even though she's this close to getting her dream offer - to work in international lending - Esposito opts for a male- dominated snake pit: the trading floor. She is the first woman on it. Ever. "They thought I was kidding. They said, 'Didn't you hear all the cursing? Didn't you see people throwing telephones?' I did! But there was an adrenaline there, and I liked it.
1977 One of Esposito's networking lunches, with an executive from AG Becker, an investment bank, leads to a job as an assistant vice president. "I got back to my office and he called me an hour later and said, 'Can you be here at 8 tomorrow morning for an interview?'"
1980 "A headhunter kept calling me, saying they represented a premiere bank. I said, 'There's only two places I want to work: Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs.' And they said, 'It's one of the two.'" Goldman Sachs's John Whitehead hires Esposito to introduce products that would help Goldman's customers diversify their risk.
1990 Esposito is one of six women who leave high-paying jobs to form Artemis Capital, a boutique investment banking firm. "I played tennis every week with a group of women from Goldman. After tennis we'd grab a burger and a beer and chat about the markets. We loved Goldman, but the entrepreneurial spirit had bitten us."
1991 Artemis is profitable in its first year.
1994 At the beginning of the Internet rush, Esposito returns to a big firm - Bear Stearns, this time - as a senior managing director developing Bear's West Coast municipal finance business. "It was an exciting time to be in California."
1998 Joins a group of Goldman alums at Methias & Co., an international consulting firm, as a senior partner. "The Goldman connection is always very strong."
2001 Esposito's client at Merrill Lynch, Joe Moglia, becomes the CEO of Ameritrade. Esposito calls him in an attempt to win Ameritrade's consulting business -and he ends up hiring her as Ameritrade's chief strategy officer.
2003 Following Ameritrade's merger with Datek, Esposito chairs Ameritrade's Strategy and Client Experience Integration Committee. Translation: She'll help this online mega-brokerage lead its clients into the 21st century. "It's a unique assignment that's integral to executing a successful merger. It has been one of my most important milestones."
