In addition to hosting these cocktail parties, I am founder and Chairman of Kensington Partners, LLC, a private equity firm that sponsors leveraged buyouts with purchase prices between $10 million and $100 million, which I founded in 1999. I am the team leader for most of Kensington's acquisitions and consolidations and as Chairman, I am ultimately responsible for management of the Firm. I've spent a considerable amount of time developing Kensington's intellectual capital and tools and I'm also Kensington's Web master.

Previously, I spent most of my career in the computer industry, having been a Research Associate at Harvard Business School ("HBS") and a Software Specialist at a major computer company. At HBS, I did research in computers and information systems and was a teaching assistant for second-year MBA classes. At Digital, I supported major New England customers of Digital on Digital commercial operating systems. I was also a management consultant in information systems to many of the large commercial banks in Boston and several high technology companies in Massachusetts. I've been active in high technology entrepreneurship, as an entrepreneur, venture advisor and as a consultant to Venture Founders Corporation, a venture capital fund.

I studied political philosophy and economics at Pitzer College (the Claremont Colleges), international relations (specifically, defense policy and arms control) at Harvard University, and management at MIT and the Wharton School of Finance. At Harvard, I was a Graduate Student Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and was a member of two working groups in national security issues at the Belfor Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government. In addition, I was a research assistant in statistics for Gary Orren in the Government department.

After Harvard, I studied classical music (specifically piano) and theory and composition with Louise Vosgerchain at Harvard and Suzanne Sobol, respectively. Music is my greatest passion in life, and I'm also interested in movies, theatre, opera, ballet and dance.

I'm still interested in computers and I'm an advanced user of many Microsoft software packages. I still spend far too much of my time reading computers journals and thinking about advanced uses of computers. Many of my applications and templates have been used by Microsoft to debug future versions of Microsoft Office, and I'm one of the world's leading experts in Microsoft Word and Excel. (Don't blame me for any of the numerous bugs in Office — Microsoft doesn't always listen to me.) I program part-time in Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications, as well as DHTML and CSS. After reading Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, I've been debating learning LISP, and maybe even writing a dialect of LISP, but on the other hand I've always found LISP to be so difficult to read. I've been learning various other Web technologies (such as Microsoft ASP.Net) as I have been putting up a Web site for these parties.

I'm also keenly interested in law. My father was a prominent attorney in Los Angeles, as was my grandfather, and my great uncle, Donald Wright, was Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court. But what really got me interested in law was what happened in the first company I bought. My lawyer did not do a good job, so document A contradicted document B which said something different than document C. After the deal was closed, the seller's lawyer tried to renegotiate the deal, based on the discrepancies. To the present, I remain paranoid about the law and particularly lawyers.

I've been interested in business since elementary school, and I'm probably the only person you'll meet that was reading "The Wall Street Journal" as a teenager. (Some would say it's written for teenagers, but that's a different story.) My business interests include corporate strategy, competitive analysis, business process reengineering, project and team management, knowledge management, and commercial applications of the Internet. I remain interested in politics, international relations and microeconomics.

I'm a devout follower of David Allen and one of my primary goals is life to have my mind completely free of worry, to be totally in the moment (what Allen calls "mind like water"). I've written in Microsoft Access a "Things to Do List" system to implement the David Allen methodology, which David says is the most advanced system ever written.

The weather permitting, I try to bike the Minuteman trail every day, as well as spending an hour on stretching and resistance training. My Samoyed, Cassie, is literally the cutest dog in the world. I'm currently single and am looking for Miss Right. I've written an Internet dating profile, which Match.com says is the longest in Internet history. I've also written a 500 page memo ("Statement of Mission") on various topics.

You may want to read James' profile, his eharmony responses, as well as essays he has written.