OFF THE CHART

A former nurse builds a health care unicorn in just four years and changes her profession forever. The pulse-quickening case history of Cherie Kloss's SnapNurse.

- TOM FOSTER

WHEN SHE WAS 15 years old-decades before she would go on to revolutionize health care staffing-SnapNurse founder Cherie Kloss was emancipated from her family. Her mother was suffering from acute mental illness and had to leave the home to get care. Her parents divorced. Then her father, a Korean immigrant, decided he needed to return to Seoul to pursue a job opportunity. Cherie, who was on the Venice High School swim team and content being a 1980s Southern California kid, declined to go with him.

"If you don't leave with me, you're on your own," her father told her.

"OK," she said. "I'll be alone." Even though her family had been "super poor" before it broke apart ("inner city, government cheese, the whole thing," she says now), Kloss grew up hearing from her father that if she worked hard and studied hard, she could make it here in this country-especially if she pursued a career in engineering or medicine. She'd have to fend for herself, but her father had armed her with an immigrant's faith in the American dream.

Thus emerged Kloss's skill for winging it. She moved in with a friend, got a full-time job at a bakery, finished school, and landed a scholarship to a small Christian liberal arts college called Westmont, outside of Santa Barbara. College "felt like summer camp" after her childhood, she says. After college came nursing school at Atlanta's Emory University, then a master's in anesthesiology, and then 10 years as a working anesthetist.

But next emerged another consequence of her formative years: a restless instinct to not get too comfortable. Anesthesia, she says, "is a little like flying a plane-hours and hours of boredom but potentially some excitement when you take off and land." It was 2006, the height of the reality-TV craze, and when Kloss met a producer for A&E Networks, she decided that sounded like more fun. "How do I get started?" she asked.

"Do you have any experience?"