Rees Anderson says she learned about venture capital through the Internet. While she got her first $23,000 from family, the next round came from "e-blasting" anyone and everyone she found on the Internet. Since then, venture capital has come through networking.

Through connections in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, Rees Anderson met people from all over the world.

"I became friends with a lot of people from there, and they're very good networkers, and the next thing I knew, I was getting calls from people from all over the place, including India."

After a few consultant gigs, Rees Anderson started a medical billing and coding company in India with partner Naveen Trehan, who is based in India. She continued running that company, Globerian Inc., when she was approached by local venture capital firm vSpring to help turn around MediConnect.net, a company that digitized and electronically stored medical records.

"This company had been flat for a long time," she says. "They had built amazing technology, but they just weren't growing, and we had to do something drastically different. We had to cut costs, and we had to increase sales."

To cut costs, she turned to India, where millions of English speakers demand a fraction of the salary of U.S. employees. To increase revenue, she began to promote the company to lawyers involved in mass tort litigation and pharmaceutical litigation.

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs to workers in the developing world, but Rees Anderson says that her decision to hire abroad was made to help the company expand.

The money saved on wages overseas was invested "to hire higher paying jobs," she said. "So for me, outsourcing wasn't so much about getting rid of jobs. It was creating more high paying jobs in the U.S., which is, I think, preferable in many ways to the other way around."

In 2007, MediConnect's revenues were more than $35 million. When Rees started in 2006, revenue was $3 million.

A CEO's beginnings

Rees Anderson was born in Portland, Ore., and raised in a family of 10 children. Her father was in the FBI, and the family moved frequently. She's lived in Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, California and Utah. She says that frequent moving taught her to make friends easily.

She describes her parents as hard working and says they instilled that ethic in their children. When she borrowed money from her dad to buy a car in college, he made her sign a notarized loan with compounded interest.