$10,000 into $200 million: eschewing other people's money, Bronto Software's founders built an email dynamo.

• Author: Burns, Matthew
• Position: PROFILE

Joe Colopy knew it would be difficult. His wife was six months pregnant, and she was about to become the family's sole breadwinner as he launched a new company with little prospect for a paycheck anytime soon. Chaz Felix had fewer complications--single, no kid on the way, no mortgage--but he shared Colopy's dream to turn an idea into a successful business. Almost 13 years after the pair met over beers at a Durham pub and agreed to put $5,000 each into their venture, they sold email marketing company Bronto Software Inc. in April to San Mateo, Calif.-based NetSuite Inc. for $200 million--the fifth-largest deal for a North Carolina tech company in the last decade, according to the Durham-based Council for Entrepreneurial Development.

Many entrepreneurs make the same leap of faith, and innumerable North Carolina tech startups have been acquired or gone public over the years. What separates Bronto is that Colopy and Felix never took outside capital to start the company or finance its growth, so they didn't have to share the sales proceeds. The result was a return on investment of almost 2 million percent. Why play the tortoise and not the hare in the race to grow? "We didn't see enough benefit from it," Colopy says.

The emphasis on thrift started at Bronto's inception. After earning an MBA at UNC Chapel Hill's Kenan-Flagler Business School in 1999, Colopy began tinkering with an online database app, teaching himself how to code. He and his wife, previously living in Ecuador, had chosen Durham in the mid-1990s after pulling out a U.S. map and blindly pointing to central North Carolina. In 2000, Colopy left a marketing job at Raleigh-based software developer Red Hat Inc., which went public the previous year. "I wanted an entrepreneurial life rather than a corporate life," he says. Though he had no plan, "I knew I would figure something out."

Felix has business-oriented genes --his parents published a food-safety newsletter from the family's home in northern Virginia--and he worked as an investment banker for Bank of America Corp. While studying for his MBA at Kenan-Ragler, he put together a business plan for an online chat room, overlaid with a search engine. The venture didn't survive the dot-com collapse of 1999-2001, and Felix moved to Red Hat to work on special projects. After the company posted a poor quarter, Felix lost his job. "It was shocking when I was laid off," he says, "but it really shaped my path forward."

Although the duo worked...