I’ve been working on a longer-than-usual post recently and have felt bogged down trying to get it done.  It likely wont be longer than my typical posts in terms of word count, but it’s certainly taking longer to research as I keep stumbling upon more useful information and more products I need to test out.  Rather than keep Enter Venture idle any longer, I’m going to take this opportunity to make Enter Venture a little bit more personal.

So I was talking to my mother yesterday and…  (No, not that personal.)

Rather, this blog has been desperately lacking in the About page department since its inception.  Only recently did I even have an About page (which was an obvious mistake).  When I reworked the Enter Venture theme, one of the last things I did was to write the About page — it’s no easy task putting your life down into a few paragraphs.  In fact, it’s something I’ve tweaked up until the writing of this post.   So that begs the question, what do you think?

I’m Patrick Cushing, the lead (read: only) editor for Enter Venture.  I’m originally from Boston but now hang my hat in San Francisco because I’ve realized its much nicer to be able to visit the cold / snow rather than live in the cold / snow.

For an overly costly education (read: I’m still paying for it), I went to Columbia’s Engineering school and picked out the most interesting major I could find in Biomedical Imaging Engineering.  It was certainly interesting — how could brain images not be?  Four years later though, I realized I had little interest in things bio or medical and asked my then employer, D. E. Shaw, to send me to India to work with their software office.

In India, I began my education in all things web as a member of their Creative Services team. It was here that I found CSS / HTML to be much more enjoyable than brain image smoothing algorithms in Matlab.  I came to manage all things wiki at the India office and developed an affinity for trying to organize chaos.

After India, I sought something entirely different and found it with NYC Government as part of their Strategic Operations team working on their NYC Business Express project.  Working for NYC Government made me appreciate what it takes to build software in the enterprise — especially one where green screens still exist.  It was also the first time I felt like an adult, but I suspect wearing a suit every day will do that to anyone.

I’m currently working for Wikinvest on their Product and Marketing team where my days include everything from reaching out to bloggers, testing new products, writing & editing content, writing scripts to parse XML files, and helping to expand coverage internationally.

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