The words connection and communication define Barbara Bry's career, from her student days to her current position as vice president for business development at Proflowers.com, the largest direct-from-the-grower flower company in the United States. At San Diego-based Proflowers, there are no warehouses and no network of retail florists. Orders are transmitted electronically to growers, who cut, pack, and ship, usually within 24 hours. This supply-chain compression allows Proflowers to offer a unique guarantee —that their bouquets will stay fresh for seven days. Despite recent e-commerce volatility, Proflowers has experienced phenomenal growth, including a new partnership with Amazon.com and expansion into Japan.

Proflowers is only the latest in a variety of endeavors that Bry has been involved in since departing from Soldiers Field. Asked the secret to her success in diverse undertakings, the self-effacing Bry smiles and says, "I've never thought of myself as super-brilliant, but I'm smart enough and willing to work hard."

After graduation from HBS, where she organized an innovative class on business and the media, Bry worked for eight years as a national business reporter for the Sacramento Bee and the Los Angeles Times. In 1986, largely because of the difficulty of raising a young daughter while coping with journalism's demanding hours, Bry accepted an offer to run the newly founded CONNECT Program in Technology and Entrepreneurship at the University of California, San Diego. "It was clear," Bry says, "that growth in the old Navy town of San Diego was going to have to come from new technology companies. CONNECT was designed to link entrepreneurs with the resources they needed —primarily money, but also management and marketing skills."

Not long after, in 1989, Bry founded Athena, a nonprofit organization for women technology executives, for which she also served until recently as executive director. Through CONNECT and Athena, Bry came to know "all the technical people in town." So at lunch one day in 1995, when a friend drew a picture on a napkin of a hotel kiosk where travelers could get and send e-mail, she was able to help put together a team and raise money for ATCOM/INFO, which became the premier provider of software (Iport) for high-speed, remotely monitored, public-access connectivity. (Iport jacks are currently installed in over 215,000 hotel rooms.) ATCOM was acquired by CAIS Internet in 1999 in a deal valued at $85 million. A stint as COO of OKbridge, the largest bridge club on the Internet, further whetted Bry's appetite for Internet entrepreneurship. All this was a prelude to the phone call in 1998 from a friend in the electronic greeting-card business, who thought flower marketing could derive great advantages from the efficiencies of the Internet and wanted Bry's online expertise. Proflowers was the result.

Seated in her no-frills office at Proflowers, Bry proudly shows off photos of her husband and two daughters before pausing to reflect on the past 25 years. "I've been more successful than I ever imagined I would be, in all parts of my life," she says. "I feel really blessed."

—Thomas Frick

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