OneWire
Skiddy von Stade

After five years working as an executive recruiter in the finance industry, Skiddy von Stade started his own shop in 1995, landing clients like Lehman Brothers, Greenhill & Co., and Perry Capital. Then the Internet beckoned. Convinced by the success of Monster (MWW) and CareerBuilder that he could build a specialized site that made the recruiting process faster and cheaper for financiers, von Stade founded OneWire in New York in 2007, raising more than $15 million from finance executives. (He shut down his brick-and-mortar business in 2008.) He envisioned a site that would collect detailed, searchable information about candidates' backgrounds, rather than just upload résumés. Since launching last June and deploying a sales team in November, the site has signed some 100 client companies and amassed 50,000 prospective-employee profiles. Users applying for jobs answer customized questions based on employment history. Employers have unlimited access to these profiles, or "fingerprints" as von Stade calls them, for $15,000 per year. Von Stade, 48, says industry woes have meant an increase in demand for affordable recruiting services and expects his 52-employee company to pull in more than $3 million in revenue in 2010 and be profitable by 2011, with $10 million in revenue.

—Venessa Wong (posted on Jan. 26, 2010)