NWEN Pub Night: Beer, Pizza and Passion

I attended my first Northwest Entrepreneur Network Pub Night at Hales Ales on Thursday.  Highlights include the Red Menace Big Amber (a very hoppy ale with an interesting combination of Caramel, Carastan and a handful of Black Malts), the best pizzas I’ve had since moving away from Chicagoland,  and a lineup of short, passionate and compelling presentations from a collection of entrepreneurs:

• Gene Kavner (Eballpark), who is creating the next generation of interative fantasy [online] baseball game
• Phil Cordier (GridZones), focusing on provisioning and support of dedicated and virtual private servers on full 64-bit computing platforms
• Ross Holeman (Drinktag), describing — and handing out samples of — a unique advertising medium, which adheres to the sides of beverage containers
• Joe McCarthy (Interrelativity), evangelizing on the past, present and future prospects of proactive displays [disclaimer: that’s me, so I can’t say whether anyone found this particular presentation compelling, but I know it was short, and I’m pretty sure people could sense my passion 🙂 ].
• Tim Godfrey (no company name yet), showing a model for a new ergonomically-correct chair design (unfortunately, Tim was not handing out samples)
• Sven Liden (Teachtown), teaching us about autism, describing "An Educational Curriculum for Young Children with Special Needs" and his company’s goal of developing software for such a curriculum that can be used by ordinary folk, and calling for volunteers to partcipate in studies of parents, teachers, clinicians and researchers to help test their software (interested prospective participants can reach Teachtown at research@teachtown.com)
• Paul Kriloff (All Star Directories), inspiring us with a success story of a company that has achieved profitability through organic growth

Every NWEN event I’ve attended (in the brief three month span during which I’ve been a member) has been extremely well-motivated, well-planned and well-executed.  It is truly inspiring to be in the presence of a group of so many people who are pursuing their passions, and to be able to enjoy good beer and pizza as well is just icing on the cake :-).