Over the last decade I’ve seen much turmoil in the workplace.

First it was the end of the Tech Boom. It affected the hardware industry first, as much of the productionmoved offshore in the mid-90’s. For Diamond Multimedia, for whom I worked this meant that our products were becoming commoditized. Modems that cost over $400 sold for less than $10. This hardly left room for marketing and my kinds of international sales talents.

In 1998 I joined the then fledgling Tripwire (my third start-up ) and helped to build their international sales channel all across the globe. Security software is quite different than modems, but in time I came to be quite knowledgeable on the subject. But by the end of 2003, Tripwire had grown enough that we had penetrated most of the key international markets and the challenge became one of boosting sales. This is when the Tech Boom began to seriously fizzle, and my international sales position was likely at risk. I opted to take a severance package since cutbacks were looming, but the depth of the market retrenchment caught me by surprise. As a consequence I was unemployed for nearly eight months as I struggled to find work in a sector that was rapidly deflating. In 2004 I joined a small Adelaide-based Australian software company that was seeking to enter the US market. But funding ran out and in early 2005, I was once again unemployed. By this time I had had it with High Tech. The thrill was out of the ride, the high growth and adrenaline filled rush of the boom days were behind and the new products weren’t nearly as inspiring as those we had developed in the prior decade.

So in early 2005 I joined the Portland Development Commission and returned to the economic development work that I had left nearly 10 years before. From 2005 through most of 2007 I helped to represent Portland and sought to attract businesses to this city. In fact we were quite successful bringing more than 15 companies to the city to employ over 4,700 people, but I soon realized the constraints of working for such a high-strung government agency. In late 2007 I opted to resign to seek more innovative and less politically rigid conditions.

In November 2007 I joined what was then called Quantec LLC, a top-notch consulting firm in Portland that specialized in energy effiency. At the time I was interested in starting up the sustainability practice, and towards that end the team I headed up produced the first of-its-kind sustainability metric that was able to measure this hard-to-measure quality. Now almost two years later, we seen that while sustainability has stayed a topic of some interest, it has yet to be adopted by most companies as a goal. And hence it proved to be a poor business driver.

In the summer of 2008, I decided to pull the plug and began to work heavily on energy efficiency evaluations. recently, I have gotten deeply involved in the marketing of the software tools that Quantec (now the Cadmus Group) had produced.

Walking across the Residenz Platz in Salzburg with Martin in the 2002 October rain.