
Before Sean Taylor ran Healthcare.com, he built a software company from a living-room whiteboard and gave it a name chosen by Facebook voters. The route from one client to 100 million data points says plenty about how he likes to work: make the system useful, then make it scale.

A childhood friendship, two computers and a stubborn promise to customers turned a Connecticut parts counter into a $200 million online business. The interesting part is not the speed. It is what Scott Drozd refused to discard along the way.