There are two extremes of the many ways to start a high-tech company: slowly and cautiously over a period of years, or rapidly with the aid of millions in investment. Neil Hinrichsen has done both: his company Realtime was started in a converted warehouse and grew slowly, eventually being bought by Datatec in 1997; Fundamo, a mobile payments service that he co-founded in 1999, exploded from a good idea to a global business in just a few months with the backing of some large investors during the dot-com boom.