Hooman Radfar and Austin Fath
Ages: Both, 26
Company: Clearspring Technologies
Funding: $7.5 million, from investors including Novak Biddle Venture Partners, ZG Ventures, former America Online CEO Steve Case
Widgets are spreading like wildfire across the Web. Suddenly everyone's creating, disseminating and attaching these fungible nuggets of code to add icons, videos, dialog boxes, and other content to Web pages. “Widgets are the Web à la carte,” says Fath, who, with Radfar, founded Clearspring in 2004 to help companies package and distribute their content in widget form and then track where it goes. Clearspring, which counts the National Basketball Assn. and Universal Pictures as customers, serves 30 million widgets a day.
Lesson learned: “The way you become successful is not by hiding your great idea, but by including people around you and asking for advice,” Radfar says. “And you have to believe in what you are doing.”
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