"People who embrace design, it infiltrates their entire life," says Fab.com cofounder (and Most Creative Person 2012) Bradford Shellhammer [3]. "Once you go there, it's hard to go back."

It's particularly true for his company, which started as a limping social networking site for gays but pivoted [4] into a wildly popular hub for shoppers. Fab grabs them with a meticulously curated array of neat stuff. Before visitors know it, they're design junkies.

Shellhammer shares one trait with other Innovation Agents, however: He and his partner took a giant risk on a big idea, one that meant shuttering a site they had poured their hearts into. "We had a 15-minute board meeting," Shellhammer says, in which they pitched the idea of turning the lights off on their social hub Fabulis and relaunching it as an e-commerce site. "We invest in people, not ideas," his board reassured him. Here's the rest of the story from the person behind big idea of Fab.com.