It's not every CEO who is willing to wait tables to keep her business going. Then again, Vicky Wu is not your everyday CEO. The founder of mobile gaming company Froghop was an intern at Lockheed when she was 16. She started her own company in 2000 – and it's still in business. And at 31, she thrives in a profession traditionally dominated by men.

Wu says she is not a feminist, but describes herself as an individualist who prefers to focus on developing games that will appeal to a range of popular interests versus gender. A self-described Type A personality, she did her time at big corporations, but also knew that "I had this entrepreneurial streak," she says. "I actually love all the drama" that happens in smaller companies.

That's not to say it's always been easy. After all, she waited those tables for a reason. When the company's private funding ran out in the 2002 timeframe, she told her handful of colleagues that if they wanted to freelance, she would make ends meet waiting tables. For a period of time, she pulled four shifts in two days, returning home at midnight smelling like fish from the restaurant. But she made it work.

The company evolved along the way – learning, for one thing, that working with professional sports for distribution of mobile information wasn't enough to pay the bills. Eventually, the company went back to offering cross-platform experiences and leveraged mobility to increase accessibility to multiplayer games. The company also developed a consulting arm. As one of Wu's friends described it to her, she originally collected the beef, lettuce and tomato for a McDonald's, but she ended up creating a Taco Bell. Today, the company works with game developers and publishers to distribute its platform and services.

Part of her job at Froghop was made easier by the skills she developed in previous jobs, including her stint at Nextel Communications. Back then, revenue sharing was just a distant concept, but she analyzed the company's software development processes and learned about efficiencies. It was when Nextel started moving staff to its Virginia facility that Wu saw her chance to not only stay in her hometown area of Boston, but make the entrepreneurial break for which she had longed.

She created her company's name – and "thankfully, it didn't have WAP in it," she quips. The Froghop moniker is designed to reflect the mobile nature of the company's products, as well as being easy to remember.

These days, Wu makes time to mentor students and do philanthropic work for orphans. She even finds time to play video games, snowboard and do the lindy hop. Now, it seems, she's smelling like a rose.