#4 - Julie Clark - $25 Million Baby Einstein Exit

Julie Clark is the schoolteacher and mom turned entrepreneur who launched Baby Einstein, which many parents know for the way their videos seem to magically soothe their infants.


From its start in 1996, Baby Einstein was a huge hit, and after just five years, Julie sold the business to Disney for $25 million -- and in the course of that, discovered what many founders do -- that the buyers take over and start making the decisions, sometimes in a far different direction, and sometimes to the great despair of the original founders. For Julie, there was a lot of sadness and anxiety in the period that followed the sale.


Julie is also amazingly a two-time cancer survivor -- or assassin, as she likes to say -- so on top of the transition she was going through with her business, she was also attacking breast cancer.


She’s now on her second startup -- a preschool prep program called Wee School -- and she says it’s nothing like the easy early days of Baby Einstein, something a lot of entrepreneurs face on round two.