Donna Carpenter
Alex Brogan
When Donna Carpenter met Jake Burton Carpenter on a ski trip in 1981, she was a Barnard College student dreaming of international relations. Within months, she'd dropped out and moved to Vermont to help build a snowboard company operating out of a barn. Four decades later, she runs Burton Snowboards — a $400 million empire that transformed an outcast sport into Olympic competition.
The transformation wasn't inevitable. It required seeing possibility where others saw problems.