Last summer Gregory W. Slayton (MBA '90) took a break from the rapid pace of Silicon Valley. The peace and quiet of a family vacation allowed him some time to reflect and, incidentally, he mentions, to start three companies.

Slayton seems to take his entrepreneurial spirit everywhere he goes. When working at McKinsey & Co. in the early 1990s, he cofounded its Multimedia Practice Group and was soon recruited to take over the New Media division of Paramount Studios. He then cofounded Worlds, Incorporated, an Internet software company for which he raised $17 million in venture capital backing. At the time, "we were bigger than Yahoo!," says Slayton, who parted ways with Worlds when he couldn't convince his colleagues that they needed to shift to Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), now the industry standard.

In 1996, he became president and chief operating officer of another Internet software producer, ParaGraph International. In just sixteen months he secured stock options for all employees, increased overall revenues by 110 percent, and won over big clients such as Disney, Microsoft, and Apple. When ParaGraph was purchased by Silicon Graphics in June 1997 (netting excellent returns for shareholders and enabling Slayton to take a sabbatical), it had gained 75 percent of worldwide marketshare in VRML authoring products.

Slayton's latest ventures include developing an oil mapping technology, running a management consulting firm, and overseeing his own investment company. "Execution is everything," he says. "But, that said, if you have a fundamentally flawed strategy, you can execute your way off a cliff."