Entrepreneurs

The Let's Be Frank food trailer parked most days outside the old Helms Bakery complex is no ordinary lunch wagon. The San Francisco company that operates the hot-dog vendor serves franks and sausages made from cows that ate only grass or pigs that were raised humanely. Customers also can choose turkey or soy dogs, all on buns from L.A. Breadworks. The small business was funded in part by venture capitalist Peter Rogers and his Dry Creek Ventures, which targets clean energy, water and food businesses.

A little more than a year ago, Rajesh Razdan quit his cushy, well-paying job with a global cellphone company here to launch a small start-up that would offer a slew of new services to cellphone users. India's recent economic boom, he said, was the perfect setting in which to become an entrepreneur.

If we have the Great Depression to thank for inventions such as the Twinkie, Monopoly and the photocopier, this recession may be remembered for inspiring a biodegradable shower mat, a tie that holds iPods and a gadget that breaks the vacuum seals of jars. That's because some self-starters among the ranks of the unemployed, sick of trudging off to job fairs and sending out resumes, are starting businesses to finally launch that invention they've been mulling over for years.

. -- Few Internet entrepreneurs practice what they preach as devoutly as LinkedIn Corp. co-founder Reid Hoffman, whose business revolves around his belief that good fortune flows from good relationships. Hoffman, 40, has put that principle to work by mining his own vast network of Silicon Valley connections to rake in one Internet jackpot after another. A college friendship led Hoffman to PayPal and his first windfall when EBay Inc. bought the online payment service for $1.5 billion in 2002.

Virgin Galactic, billionaire Richard Branson's space travel venture, plans to order five more spaceships and aims to turn a profit within five years of its commercial launch in 2010, a company official said this week. Prospective space travelers have so far placed deposits totaling more than $31 million for tickets that cost $200,000 each and would give them five minutes in space, said Alex Tai, the company's group director.

The Internet bubble of the late 1990s ended with a painful pop. When today's young entrepreneurs get together, the only bubbles they see are in their mimosas. Even as the rest of the business world frets about the gloomy economy, Silicon Valley is living the high-tech high life.

The future head of the would-be Raven-Symone Enterprises or Raven-Symone Inc. sits in a Toluca Lake diner, chewing ice out of a plastic cup, outlining her plans for world domination. "I want to have a record label and a licensing company," declares Raven-Symone. "I want to have a publishing company and a management company where I can launch all kinds of artists. I want to do everything." After a brief pause, Raven-Symone delivers the bottom line, without a trace of irony: "I want to be Disney."

To serve the fast-growing ranks of female business owners like Kathy Macias, who runs a Riverside auto repair shop, the Small Business Administration has added more than two dozen assistance centers in the last two years. Now, that pace has ground to a halt. No new federal women's business centers will open in the 2009 fiscal year, which starts Oct. 1, because of funding constraints, according to the Small Business Administration official who oversees the grant program.

Their name, the Businessmen, was derived from the slang term "taking care of business." They were among several dominant African American gangs -- the Slausons, the Gladiators, the Del Vikings -- in the early 1960s in the neighborhood then known as South-Central: the precursors to the Bloods and the Crips. Now, the Businessmen of South Park have traded their fedoras for bifocals, and their whiskers are gray.