7 Entrepreneurs On The Brink Of Greatness

Yet every great company began as a startup, from Thomas Alva Edison's lab in New Jersey to Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's garage in Palo Alto, Calif. And every entrepreneur likewise started out as an unknown.

We hear about a lot of new companies and meet a lot of founders, and write about far fewer. That's a selectivity driven by reality: It only makes sense to focus on the companies that matter most to our readers.

But lately we've run across some genuinely inspiring company builders who strike us as more than just your typical wannabes. Some are first-timers; others are serial entrepreneurs who have yet to become household names.

The one common thread is that they are all at crucial moments for their startups, having proven a concept and gotten ready to test it at massive scale. And in our conversations, buzzwords like "disruption" and "viral loops" never came up. Instead it's the hard, challenging work of signing up customers and breaking into markets.

None are assured success. But for each of these seven, this will be a must-watch, make-or-break year.

And if they do make it? You can say you read about them before they were famous.