Heidi Roizen, former CEO and co-founder of software company T/Maker, graduated from Stanford Business School in 1983 and agreed to work with her brother, selling a software program he had written. At the time, very few people even knew what a computer was; only three of the 300 students in her class had PCs, according to Roizen, and there were very few computer stores, let alone software companies.

"We didn't have a business plan or significant expertise," says Roizen, whose story is available at http://edcorner.stanford.edu. "One of my classmates sat me down in 1983 and said, 'I can't believe you are throwing away two years at the top business school in the country to do something as stupid as going to work for your brother starting a software company.'"

But T/Maker, which got started in 1983 when Roizen was 23, was a $3-million-a-year software publisher by 1988 and continued to be successful when Roizen sold the company to Deluxe Corp. of St. Paul, Minn., the nation's largest printer of bank checks, in June of 1995.

What were the qualities that made Roizen successful? Jeff Hawkins, pioneer of Palm computing, says he does not believe that there is a single model for an entrepreneur. (video). But an analysis of the people who ran the Inc. 500 companies of 2002 found the following:

	8 percent of the CEOs surveyed had only a high school education
	18 percent had an M.B.A
	41 percent had started another company before starting this one

Entrepreneurs come from all demographic backgrounds. According to Texas Magazine, Eleven percent of all companies in 2001 had minority CEOs. The enrollment of minority students at top business schools reflects a trend toward diversity: as of 2001, minorities made up 18 percent at Virginia's Darden School, 19 percent at Harvard, and 20 percent at Duke University's Fuqua School. These top-ranked schools and their students have the inside track with corporate recruiters who want to hire students with an understanding of how to manage diversity.

Start-ups fail for a number of reasons, and at every stage of the process, from idea to profitable company. Tomima Edmark was successfully marketing a hair product known as the Topsytail when several knockoff companies developed copies of her patented invention and sold them so cheaply that her sales dropped to zero. Edmark reports that she had to spend over a million dollars defending her patent, and that her selling price was permanently lowered as a result of the knockoffs. This module will help you understand and, hopefully, avoid, some of the most common pitfalls of new start-ups.