Jim Ries sits on the floor with his laptop and watches his ten-year-old daughter’s dance class rehearse.

That is, he watches when he’s not working.

Between applauding leaps and offering encouraging smiles, Jim sits against the dance studio wall and responds to emails, drafts technical documentation and programs software applications. It’s both the joy and the bane of his existence.

“When it’s your business, you never leave work,” Jim says. “You’re always thinking, always improving, always communicating. We love it, but there is no closing the door at 5 p.m. I think about if all night; sometimes I work all night. It goes everywhere with us.”

The other part of “us” is Allen Mavel, who with Jim owns Enginet Technologies and Assessment Builders, two companies formed from the two programmers’ passion for code, product development and entrepreneurship. Enginet, primarily a software development consulting firm, was founded in 2000 after Jim and Allen had left Datastorm Technologies, the Columbia firm that rode the crest of the dot-com industry several years ago. (more…)