Steve Mellon/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
	The tieless Jeff Swoveland, 47, at BodyMedia, where many of his colleagues are young enough to be his children. He traded in a corporate executive job -- and the tie -- for a chance to be more creative and versatile, and to have a more flexible schedule.

As the city reinvents itself, some of its people are finding opportunities to do so, too. That's what happened to Jeff Swoveland. Just a little more than two years ago, Swoveland had one of the kind of jobs that those who climb the ladders of big corporations covet -- treasurer for Equitable Resources. His One Oxford Centre office, six-figure salary, well-tailored suits and the comfort of a corporate routine were the sorts of things to which many in business aspire.

But Swoveland quit.

It wasn't that he was dissatisfied with the natural gas and exploration company. Instead, after doing some informal consulting for one of the region's biotechnology start-ups, Swoveland, now 47, got hooked on something that few big, established corporations are able to provide.

In a nutshell, it's the chance to help create something from the ground up.

To be sure, "I had to think long and hard about it," Swoveland said. But ultimately, it was chance he couldn't resist when the tiny Downtown company, BodyMedia, offered him a full-time job as chief financial officer.

"It really had to do with the fact that here in Pittsburgh there is this fledgling biotech area. I think there's a lot of opportunity," said Swoveland. What's more, "It's tremendously fun.

"I do think the [big societal] problems over the next 10 to 20 years, the issues and opportunities will be in health care. Anytime you have that much stuff going on in that big of a market, there are opportunities."

BodyMedia, which last week signed an agreement to sell its wearable health monitoring devices through the Swiss health care concern, Roche Diagnostics, hopes to carve a market in the clinical treatment of diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.

Never mind that Astro Teller, chief executive officer of the start-up, sported shoulder-length hair or, like any number of the company's 20 employees, could be one of Swoveland's children. He seems to delight in it. "It just blows the notion of age away," he said.

"When you think about Astro and me, it's a contrast," Swoveland chuckled in a recent interview. But as in many successful marriages where opposites not only attract but fit together like yin and yang, "We work together extremely well. Astro is a visionary and blindingly intelligent, and I have had a lot more commercial background."

Teller doesn't hesitate to return the compliment. "When Jeff and I sit down with venture capitalists, they look to me for certain skills [as well as for] vision and integrity. But it adds a tremendous amount [of credibility] to know there's somebody who has such deep experience with everything from financial responsibility and accounting issues to working with banks -- someone who has been in the board rooms of New York Stock Exchange companies."

Swoveland made the career switch in August 2000, just after the market for technology companies crested. Such moves at the time weren't uncommon in Silicon Valley, Boston and other high-tech meccas. It was less common here, executive recruiters say, simply because there are fewer technology firms here.

Wherever it happens, jumping ship from big corporations to start-ups is almost always "a gutsy move," said Tom Flannery, state managing director of Boyden Global Executive Search.

Flannery needs no more evidence than the number of people who've found themselves out of jobs as a result.

"I can't tell you how many resumes I've gone through in the past year of people who had fairly predictable careers through 1990s and then, in 1998, 1999 or 2000, struck off for the promised land,'' he said. "For most of them it never happened.

"Of course, one can never divine the personal reasons for people doing this. They're all over the board, everything from personal fulfillment to being blocked in the position they're in."

Perhaps it's because there were motivations other than the glitter of stock offerings that many who've sought Flannery's services "have fewer regrets than one might think. They really do feel they've charted a new course and feel better about themselves for having done so.''

Matt Freed/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
BodyMedia Chief Executive Officer Astro Teller leads a group of people who produce health monitoring devices that people wear and that interface with the firm's Web site.

Certainly Swoveland, who said he took a pay cut to join BodyMedia, was looking for more than economic reward, though he hopes that also will come through his equity stake.

For the moment, what he's found is an entirely different atmosphere -- less structured, more invigorating.

He said he works as many hours as he did before, but that his schedule is more flexible.

"At Equitable, I was in my office at 6 a.m. Now I have breakfast with my kids.''

And Swoveland is no longer a slave to ties, which he mostly reserves for weddings, he joked.

But his jeans and open-collared shirt are merely the outward appearances of a culture that is different at its core from the one found in major corporations.

"In the uniformed [corporate] environment, you get sort of compartmentalized. Here, you do everything," irrespective of title, he said.

There's also a wholly different mind-set about making mistakes and taking risks.

At most big public companies, particularly in today's uncertain economy and punishing stock market, "You have to work harder just to stay in the same place. You're seeing the multiples [of earnings to stock prices] really compress," he said. As a consequence, making mistakes and taking risks -- which aren't tolerated well in the best of times -- are all but off limits, Swoveland said.

At start-ups, mistakes and risks are part of a natural evolution.

"You have to constantly reinvent yourself, especially at a place like BodyMedia," Swoveland said. "We're not selling marginal change in products. We're coming up with a brand-new technology.

"This is a new market. It never existed before."

To him, "Just to be back in a sort of very creative mode and working with very, very smart young people is great."

Although friends and colleagues "thought I was a nut" for taking the leap, Swoveland -- who began his career as a geophysicist, later obtained his MBA and hopscotched through posts with four major corporations -- holds a different view.

"When you get into a position [in a large corporation] it's pretty easy to start getting blinders on. You sort of start seeing the world through that view."

Among other things, stepping out of that environment has revived his sense of where technology is heading, he said. "The clouds have opened up and I can see a lot more trends."

Needless to say, in the face of huge downsizings, the deep pockets of big corporations aren't a safety net, either.

Unfortunately, for many who fall victim when the corporate ax falls, "They're at the point where they've done the same thing over and over again for 20 years," Swoveland said.

"I may be wrong, but I like to think the marketability of my skills has been enhanced by plowing through these last two years of issues, raising money and helping to successfully position the company."