"So, What Are You Doing?"

"(These Days?)"

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~ I get asked this a lot. So, just as I did a year ago on my last lap around the sun, I'll write a quick update.

I'm still doing consulting and contract work, as well as working on some startups (of my own as well as others.) The best description that more or less braids all the strands? Entrepreneur-at-large, pitching in wherever there is opportunity to create or grow an interesting business from idea to revenue.

Some of my current projects are the same as a year ago. A couple didn't work out and had to be put down. There's also a few new ones:

• Enerdyne Solutions provides products and services for the thermal management of electronics—cool solutions for hot problems! Every 10°C rise in operating temperature reduces lifetime in half. We make the industry's highest-performing thermal interface solution (sold retail and OEM), provide a void-free compliant solder process for clients, perform environmental, life and stress testing, and do consulting on thermal solutions in everything from wind turbines to satellites.
• Phytelligence, a WSU spin-out, has developed advanced techniques for the micro-propagation of fruit plantlets using tissue culture—smarter plants. We produce plantlets faster, with greater vigor and more uniform genetics and morphology, and can rapidly propagate and get to growers some of the highest demand material in a year where there is an industry supply chain backlog of 4 years.
• Consulting under my own shingle as Fingo Consulting. (Fingo is Latin for "I create".) Some of my clients have (successfully!) garnered investor funding using my work. Others are lifestyle businesses where an individual just needs a bit of help to turn their passion into a fully-formed business. It's great to help people realize their dreams!
• I've also joined as a partner to Executive Timeslice, a growing consulting group providing expertise and interim executive services in IT and other areas. I'm working on broadening their practice in the startup community.
• As always, there's other stuff I might write about another day...

Still volunteering in several places, including as a mentor with The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), part of the Keiretsu Forum's Cleantech Committee, and the Rotary Club of Sammamish, where I have been a charter member since its formation in 2003. (Don't miss our biggest and best event of the year, the Nightmare at Beaver Lake, sponsored again this year by Classic Rock radio station KZOK. It's our largest fund-raiser and community activity, and also the largest outdoor haunted house in a park next to a lake named for a rodent. Come find me there this October (or maybe I'll find you first; heh heh.)

Also trying (with less success than I would like) to pursue Bikram (hot) yoga, occasional hiking and golf, reading, bridge, puzzles, (never enough) travel, writing this blog, Facebook, Twitter, checking out other social media, and the occasional spasm of spastic juggling, a vestige of my simpler and less work-filled days at the Velvet Sweatshop. (Can you pass clubs? Let's get together!)

Always great to catch up with friends old and new over coffee or ales. I always make time for that, so ping me and we'll get together.

So, what are you doing?