The month of February has been very busy on a number of fronts.
As indicated in the previous message, I spent the entire week at the Underwater Intervention show which was held at the Convention Center in New Orleans talking to a lot of folks. I had a prolonged chat with a guy who was the customer’s representative while we were developing a deepwater ROV at SubSea International. Anyway, he asked me what I was doing and asked if I would like to work in the Washington D.C. area as he knew of companies looking for expertise like mine. I indicated that in the past I would not have been interested, but at this point in my life I might be. He indicated that he worked very closely with a company which he had a lot of respect for, was small enough to get noticed, and had a good workload.
To be honest, I had completely forgotten about the conversation when I got a call from a manager at a consulting company in Nortyhern Virgina to ask me to send them a resume. I do so and soon after I’m asked me to come up to DC to meet with him. We have made arrangement to meet in late March as it’s the earliest all our schedules allow. I’ll keep you posted.
In any event, I am applying for a number of different positions through a variety of sources and getting little if any response. The market for technical talent at my level is rather small and definitely specialized. Companies have the luxury of being very selective about the experience level of the people they hire, and I as attempting to change industries, it’s something of a challenge.
In addition, I am pursuing no less than three other developmental opportunities for new company startup type opportunities.
- The first is the three company roll up I mentioned last time. We are working on arrangement to get all the interested parties together to discuss the issue in detail. Thus far it’s been a severe cat herding exercise and we still haven’t successfully scheduled a meeting date
- The second opportunity is with a guy I’ve known since my Neptune Sciences days. Charles Whitehead called me out of the blue when I was working at Neptune to discuss his business development activities around something called shape memory alloy materials. Charles is a rather dynamic individual so our initial conversations tended to very long, but informative. Recently Charles has focused his energy on the offshore oil and gas market and we have put together some idea for products around which to create the first component of a multi-tiered corporate entity. Charles invited me to go to the Houston Technology Center’s Venture Capital Conference at which he was invited to speak. It was an interesting experience in that I got to liaise with a large number of investors both small and large. We did meet a couple of investors who were very interested in the technology, so in that regard the conference was a success
- My third opportunity is with a guy I’ve known since my SubSea days, and is rather out in left field. I met Paul Tidwell while at SubSea as Paul was looking for a deepwater ROV to conduct a survey mission on a German submarine he had located in very deep water of the Cape Verde islands. The deal with SubSea to use the ROV never materialized, but I’ve kept touch with Paul ever since. He has recently moved from the Washington D.C. area to Mandeville, which is near my house. Paul and I have been meeting regularly to discuss his plans to develop a company around search, recovery and conservation of undersea antiquities.
While all this is going on, daily life continues. The house is for sale, but the market is still very slow. Work at Outland continues with new products being developed daily. Some of these are pretty interesting. Working at Outland pretty much leaves only Friday’s for job hunting, but does provide much needed cash flow to keep the household functional.
Y’all take care now!