Small Biz

Accidental Entrepreneurs

Lesley Mattos

Adesso Albums, San Francisco
Founded: 2002
Employees: 2
Revenue: more than $1 million (2007)

Tech industry veteran Lesley Mattos went to Italy for a friend's wedding shortly after quitting her job at Cisco (CSCO) in 2001. "She asked me to take Polaroid pictures of her guests and Scotch tape them into this leather scrapbook," Mattos says. It was an instant memory that the bride and groom could take on their honeymoon, but she realized the scrapbook could look sleeker.

Back in San Francisco, she got a designer to make a prototype album that would let guests slip in Polaroids and write messages without any tape or glue.She launched the product in 2002 and last year brought in more than $1 million in sales, mostly through her own Web site and the online bridal clearinghouse, The Knot (KNOT).