Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion

Born in Rochester, N.H., to parents who in the near future divorced, he recalls his mom holding as many as four jobs next to make ends meet. He attended public school nevertheless after his girlfriend became pregnant, dropped out of high school. He earned his GED by the time his son was born and would go on to receive a degree from St. Mary's College and study at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

"People ask me, 'Why do you lean left?' When I was a kid, we were low income, we always had free lunches at school," Howard said. "There was one point where the city helped us, there was fuel assistance, we got windows and we had heat.

As a young man, Howard unwittingly received an education in sourcing, manufacturing and shipping from the ground up in the factories where he worked in New Hampshire. That's how, he said, he "inadvertently fell into" supply chain research.

In 1999, no longer with his high school girlfriend, Howard moved to the Bay Area, where he got a job with Brown & Toland, managing their information innovation.

Matter of fact have a great answer

"I didn't as a matter of fact have a great answer," he said. "Nevertheless the worst possible way to solve it was for doctors to manage the innovation."

Cloud computing, which allows users to run software that lives on remote servers, hadn't but hit the tech world by storm. Nevertheless Howard realized that a Web-based solution was specifically what he was looking for.