October 10, 2003   |   Radhika Kaushik [Biz Ink] — Daphne Carmeli drives a black Porsche with a license plate that reads "ULIVE1Z" or, said aloud, "You live once." It's a reflection of an attitude she adopted about a decade ago.

A brush with death in the mid-90s, which nearly left Carmeli without feeling in her legs, taught her never to take life or her potential for granted.

Carmeli, co-founder, president and CEO of Palo Alto-based Metreo Inc., describes herself as a tough "sabra," a Hebrew word for prickly pear. In other words, she's prickly on the outside and sweet on the inside. It's the prickliness that enabled her to survive a near-death situation.

"It was a situation that resulted in some pretty severe internal bleeding requiring surgery," she explains. "It kind of put me out for about six months. I was left without feeling in my legs and there was this question [of whether] it ever [would] come back."

Carmeli remembers that at the time, she didn't have "a lot of tolerance for such nonsense."

She won't share any further details about her experience, saying only that she learned a lesson and let it go.

Maybe her tenacity has something to do with the fact that she's lived in the two different worlds of New York and Israel. Carmeli is both an impatient New Yorker and an aggressive Israeli.

"Israelis and New Yorkers -- put the two together and that's who I am. You take the chutzpah and the passion and [later] transplant it to California," says Carmeli, who moved to California in 1991, soon after receiving her MBA, because she was attracted to the "entrepreneurial spirit."

During the six months Carmeli spent recuperating from the near-death experience, she gained additional clarity on key life decisions. For instance, she realized what she wanted to do with her career.

"I was working on my health at home and I started thinking, 'Do I want to stay here [in this state] or not?' All career-[related] questions suddenly became clearer," says Carmeli, who says she also thought a lot about her two sons, now 8 and 11.

Prior to her near-death encounter, Carmeli was working as vice president of marketing at Mountain View-based Netscape Communications Corp. During the prolonged months of inactivity, she realized it was time to move on and do something more meaningful.

So, in February 2000 -- around the time the technology bubble started to lose air -- Carmeli charged ahead and co-founded a company that provides software solutions for an online community of buyers and sellers.

Carmeli recalls the period as a tough time.

"Questions were just starting to be asked because e-dot-sell-anything-online was getting a lot of funding. The hallucination was just starting to get over," Carmeli says.

She raised many eyebrows by starting Metreo.

"People would ask, 'The economy has tanked, why are you starting a company now?'" Carmeli recalls.

But Carmeli's parents had always taught her to be on "the positive side of relentless."

"One thing that resonates around [Carmeli] is the relentless pursuit in a down economy," says Paul Nagy, vice president of product marketing for Metreo. "Where [other] people [would be] focusing back on repositioning the entire business and losing track of projects, Daphne drives things and keeps the team focused on the top five things that matter."

Carmeli has a no-nonsense approach and a fierce desire to compete and excel.

She traces these traits back to her childhood. Carmeli started training as a classical pianist at 4 and was competing by 8, winning numerous competitions, including a one involving young pianists from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. For her winning debut, she played at Carnegie Hall.

"I had the showmanship from day one. I never got butterflies in my stomach," recalls Carmeli, who wanted to follow a career in music, but practical advice from her father made her reconsider. Her father told her how hard it would be to make a living in music. She asked herself who she was and what she wanted to do, and pondered the question, "Are people born or made?"

Carmeli believes she was born with an entrepreneurial drive and learned a strong work ethic from her parents.

Since math came naturally to her, Carmeli studied math at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. During her time at Brandeis, she launched a laundry business, which she eventually sold to the university.

"No one likes to do laundry. I would go into local Laundromats and negotiate a deal and all I had to do was pick up [the laundry] and drop it off," Carmeli says.

It was just the beginning of her entrepreneurial ventures.

Next, she launched a typing business. Carmeli was the tireless typist, charging $15 to type up a paper for someone who called at 1 a.m. Having afternoon classes made it a good business model.

And today, Carmeli is also the part-owner of Varda Chocolatier, a multimillion-dollar chocolate business based in New Jersey.

Clearly, Carmeli's entrepreneurial spirit knows no bounds.

About Radhika Kaushik
Radhika Kaushik is a Biz Ink reporter. You can reach her at rkaushik@svbizink.com.