Andrew Frame
Ages: 27
Company: Ooma
Funding: $22 million from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, The Founders Fund, Worldview
Frame started his first business, an Internet service provider (ISP), at the age of 15, and had a job offer from Cisco at 17. “It took me about 15 seconds to decide,” Frame says. He spent the next decade helping Cisco resolve thorny network problems around the globe, and working for a startup, before founding Ooma. The company is in stealth mode, so Frame won't say much about what it does. But Ooma counts former executives of Apple, Cisco, Yahoo!, and TiVo as employees and plans to release its first consumer-electronics product this year. “This has not been attempted before,” Frame says. “We've come up with a technology that fundamentally changes the way home phone service is delivered.”
Lesson learned: "When you have a position to fill, figure out who would be the best in the world at that role—somebody so good it would be unimaginable that they would take the job,” Frame says. “Once you determine who that is, figure out how to hire that person."
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