This summer, BusinessWeek set out on its fifth annual search to find the country's most promising young entrepreneurs. As in previous years, we asked readers to nominate candidates ages 25 and under running their own companies. After the call for nominations ended in August, their staff whittled the batch down to 25 impressive businesses.
Box.net was honored among the top 25 selected list of candidates. Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith started Box.net in 2005, when they were both college sophomores, as a tool to collaborate on projects with fellow students. The pair -- childhood friends from Seattle -- soon saw business potential in an online platform to let companies share information securely. Nine months after launching, they both left school (they were at University of Southern California and Duke, respectively) and moved to the Bay Area to work on the company full time, with an initial $350,000 investment from Mark Cuban. (His stake has since been bought out.) The service, targeted toward companies with fewer than 100 employees, has 3 million users representing 50,000 businesses.