With a degree in economics and political science, he joined the management group of Meredith & Grew, an old-line real estate company in Boston.

Soon, he moved to TCF Bank in Minneapolis during the S&L crisis, before joining the MBA program at the University of Minnesota. After graduation, he became a consultant with Deloitte & Touche, where he spotted an opportunity in health care payment.

With his colleagues and partners, he started a new venture called Definity Health. After investing nearly a million of their own money, the partners raised $75 million in three rounds of venture capital. Four years later, they sold the business to United Health Group for $307 million.

This is how they did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

From there he moved on to painting houses while in high school and selling advertising while in college. When he finished college he took his first professional job with a reduction in pay because he could not find a job that paid him a comparable amount.

His first job happened to be in the food industry where Sigel quickly made his mark as a superb salesman. This caught the eye of a food industry entrepreneur who hired Sigel and then made him a partner. This partnership became very productive and Sigel soon found himself buying a nearly bankrupt food company to pursue his passion – to sell pre-cooked ribs to restaurants and food stores. He bought the assets by assuming the liabilities, which is a great way to get into your own business especially if you do not want to invest a lot of cash and you know how to turn the business around.

Over the years he built this business into a giant in the food industry and then sold it four times. The last time was to General Mills when sales reached over $100 million.

The next time you eat Lloyd’s barbeque from a supermarket, know that this is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

It was only natural for Brett to create products and services, and sell them, and he got into entrepreneurial activities in junior high school. That is when he learned to ride unicycles in gym class – in fact he became so focused on learning to ride that he skipped other classes to learn and then built his own unicycle because he couldn’t afford to buy one.

When he was 16 he dropped out of high school and started at the University of Minnesota on an early entrance program where he got his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering, and his MBA. He joined ADC Telecommunications following graduate school and he got an introduction to the fast-changing telecommunications industry.

He then spent some time at a manufacturer of products for recreational vehicles. But the entrepreneurial bug was still around, so at the ripe old age of 28, he joined three friends to start Spanlink Communication, Inc. with $3,000 of invested capital.

This was the only equity invested in the venture till its initial public offering. When Cisco wanted to invest in the company, Spanlink went private at a valuation of $80 million. Subsequent financings and transactions over the next few years established a company value in excess of $130 million.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

After his stint in the military, Shank got his degree from Harvard Law School. When he graduated, he and his wife had two kids, and he wanted to avoid the hassle of the East Coast (the final straw was when he had to stand in line at a grocery store at midnight) and moved back to the Midwest where he grew up.

He joined Dorsey & Whitney, one of the premier law firms in Minneapolis. But he found out that he was one of the oldest associates, so when he got the offer to become corporate counsel to a major toy manufacturer called Tonka Toys, he grabbed the opportunity.

This soon led to him becoming CEO of Tonka at the age of 34. After an ill-timed acquisition, Tonka was sold and Shank had time on his hands.

That is when he saw giant waves converge and came up with the concept of an online university for graduate education. This vision has now grown to a $260 million (sales) company with market valuation of about $1 billion.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

His dad was teaching him accountability (and, as a father, maybe trying to get a teenager to postpone the start of his driving). After graduating from high school, he joined the Air National Guard.

After his full-time training, Schulze became a sales representative for consumer-electronics companies, including Sony, Sherwood and others. As a representative for these companies, Schulze helped retailers to market their products and learned first-hand how to sell consumer electronics – on someone else’s dime.

After five years, he realized that a manufacturer could replace these representatives at any time. To control his own destiny, he decided to start his own consumer-electronics store. He borrowed against his house and opened his first store next to some college campuses in St. Paul.

From that one store, Dick Schulze created a juggernaut that is today’s Best Buy, with about 1,000 stores throughout the world. His initial “aspirational” goal was $1 billion in sales. With the right retail model (the third model in Best Buy’s evolution), Best Buy blew past this goal and kept on growing.

Current annual revenues exceed $43 billion, with a market value of nearly $12 billion as of Dec. 31, 2008. In the process of becoming the world’s largest consumer-electronics company, Best Buy eliminated nearly 5,000 of its competitors, including many global household names.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

As a teenager, Schoenecker helped his parents with their businesses and grew and sold vegetables on the side. He learned the importance of customer service in that small town, where “everyone knows everyone.”

After high school, he enrolled at, and duly graduated from, the College of St. Thomas and went on to receive his law degree from the University of Minnesota Law School. To pay his way through school, Schoenecker built a thriving business selling diamonds and furniture to veterans returning to campus after World War II.

After graduating, Schoenecker built on the success of his businesses, with the founding of his company Business Builders. From there he built a $500 million giant.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

In succession, he started a venture to sell personal computer peripherals for the Apple computer, a consulting firm in the software industry and another company to sell computer peripherals for the Apple computer.

This taught him that it was more efficient to sell software over the Internet than by including them in disk drives or disks and sending them physically to buyers. From that insight, Ronning has built a company with annual sales of around $400 million and a market cap of nearly $1.3 billion.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

He found the job boring, so he left and joined Minnesota Wholesalers, which his father-in-law owned. He stayed there for 10 years. When he joined the business, the product line was focused on horse supplies and related hardware. Due to his initiatives, when he left it 10 years later in 1960, the business was a thriving catalog showroom selling name-brand small appliances, housewares, electronics, and jewelry.

When his father-in-law died, his brother would not sell Roitenberg an equal share in the business, so Roitenberg decided to go his own separate way. Since he had little money, he could not open his own showroom. Instead he used his expertise and experience to found Creative Merchandising & Publishing.

Creative M&P merchandised and published a catalog to be used by businesses wanting to get into the catalog-showroom business. He earned money through the sale of catalogs to these businesses.

Creative M&P negotiated prices, ad allowances, terms, etc. A small merchant could buy like a giant through the volume produced by joining together.

The Creative group grew into the largest catalog-showroom merchandisers in the world, with combined sales over 6 billion dollars.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

So it was only natural that Paulson would take up football. Paulson followed in his father’s footsteps and started playing competitive football in the fifth grade.

To earn extra money, he started selling shoes and became very good at it. After high school, he kept trying to excel at college football, but injuries soon put an end to those hopes. He started selling tires, and his sales skill so impressed one of his customers that he referred Paulson to a friend who was starting a company to distribute a new way of listening to music: 8-track tapes.

This started a meteoric rise for Paulson in the music business. In 1983, he started Navarre to distribute music and software. It is now the seventh-largest software publisher and the largest importer and ‘re-purposer’ of Japanese anime in North America with annual sales of around $700 million at its peak.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.

Leonard Kotula, Don’s dad, owned a small salvage yard in Hibbing. Leonard Kotula’s philosophy was that if you could walk, you could work. Don Kotula started working in the family business “since he was born.”

They would buy cars and equipment from a variety of sources, including area mines that were changing from mining iron ore in underground mines to open-pit taconite mines, and resell them as parts or steel.

From this humble beginning, Kotula created a tool and equipment retail giant and manufacturing company with over $800 million in sales.

This is how he did it.

This introduction is excerpted from Bootstrap to Billions: Proven Rules from Entrepreneurs who Built Great Companies from Scratch by Dr. Dileep Rao. Copying or reproduction in any format or medium without the prior express, written consent of the author is strictly prohibited.