Bryan Rosencrantz

Born: Dec. 1, 1973 (25)

President

Fitscape Inc.

As a child growing up in Portland, Ore., Bryan Rosencrantz was always among the smallest of his peers. Then he began to lift weights and bulk up.

“I noticed that people began leaving me alone a lot more,” Rosencrantz recalls. “I started getting a lot more respect.”

Now 25, Rosencrantz intends to exercise some business muscle as president of Fitscape Inc., a Marina del Rey-based Internet start-up that aims to become the Web’s leading portal site for health and fitness buffs.

The mission, says Rosencrantz, who founded the company as an undergraduate at USC three years ago, “is to get people healthier through computers and the Internet.”

Fitscape does that in a few different ways. The company’s Website is a kind of one-stop shopping site for health seekers, a place where they can purchase health and fitness products, locate a nearby gym or connect with a workout partner.

The site logs over a million hits a month, more than double what it was getting a year ago, according to Rosencrantz, who refused to reveal revenues for the privately held company.

It’s ironic that he has opted to build such a virtual business. His family owns Schnitzer Steel, one of the largest independent scrap-metal businesses in the Western United States. Rosencrantz, who has been surfing the Internet since the age of 12, grew up working in the family business, where he redesigned the company’s computer system. But he had no desire to go into the metals industry himself.

“The scrap business is very mature business,” he said. “I need a lot more room to work than corporate environments allow me.”

Rosencrantz is currently hunting for venture capital, as well as corporate clients interested in licensing his iWell program as part of their health benefits programs.

“He is very determined,” said Kathleen Allen, a professor of entrepreneurship at USC, where Rosencrantz won the Marcia Israel Award, which is given to the most outstanding entrepreneur student, in 1996. “He had a big business he could have walked into. Instead, he took a risk to start his own company.”

Larry Kanter