They are part of a growing number of post-recession college graduates who watched big businesses stumble and who decided that they had a better way. Their numbers -- and their companies -- seem to be growing in the Boston area, in part, because of the abundance of colleges and the area's emphasis on technology.

The way Stuart Moore's employer operated bothered him enough to make him quit even though his wife was pregnant and he didn't have another job lined up.

So four years ago, Moore, then 28, and [Jerry] Greenberg, then 24, founded Sapient, a client-server technology company in Cambridge that today employs about 200 workers and expects $25 million in annual revenue this year from clients such as Merrill Lynch and Au Bon Pain.