Niraj Shah

You may not have heard of Wayfair, but neither have a lot of the people who've turned the online purveyor of home goods (faux florals, ceiling fans, fire pits) into a nearly $1-billion-in-sales business. CEO Shah and his Cornell classmate Steve Conine started out with racksandstands.com in 2002 and quickly expanded, buying dozens of niche domain names and launching many from scratch -- simplydogbeds.com, justshagrugs.com, dinnerplates.com -- and in 2011 changing the company name from CSN Stores to Wayfair (700 employees went on a Boston bar crawl in Wayfair T-shirts to help market the new name). Today under three main sites -- Wayfair, flash-sales site Joss & Main, and the higher-end AllModern.com --it's the biggest online-only homegoods seller, and this summer it acquired New York retailer DwellStudio. The Boston business community is keeping close watch for an imminent IPO. We bet Jeff Bezos is too.