Rod Drury

Cloud accounting. Drury founded Xero in Wellington in 2006 to move small-business bookkeeping online, pulling transactions straight from bank feeds so owners and their accountants could reconcile accounts together in a browser. Selling through accountants, who recommended it to clients, spread it across New Zealand, Australia and Britain, helped by Britain's move to digital VAT returns. It showed a company far from Silicon Valley could lead a software category.