Living on the ... edge.

• Position: Adventures of Pavement Marking Technologies CEO Charles Nuzum

Tell Charles Nuzum that he's being shipped to Siberia, and he'll smile. A broad grin will cross his face as he recalls: Khatanga, Siberia, April 1995, and the Russian IL-76 air force jet that took him from Siberia to the North Pole - for his 2,000th skydive.

It was an international expedition where Nuzum joined 50 of the world's best skydivers. For him and many of the others, the scene went as planned. For most, the situation is unfathomable.

Flying at a speed of 250 miles per hour, in a temperature of 150 degrees below zero with the wind chill factor, Nuzum inched his way to the jet's tailgate, unable to ignore the intense knot in his gut - the same knot he felt on his first skydive with his college roommate over Seattle in 1966, and on every one since - and jumped from just over 13,000 feet. His freefall, at 120 miles per hour, lasted for 41 seconds before he tugged the canopy cord. When the parachute released, Nuzum whipped his Nikon from his custom-fitted survival suit, snapped four pictures before the camera's battery went dead from the cold, repositioned, and floated like a glider to the cracked and grinding ice-laden surface that was the North Pole drop zone.

"When I was freefalling and past the point of no return, this incredible feeling of peace and well-being enveloped me," recalls Nuzum, a CPA and currently CEO of Pavement Marking Technologies in Menlo Park, Calif., a start-up company that's developing a machine to apply traffic markings to pavement. Musing on skydiving's appeal to him, Nuzum explains, "The simple act of stepping off the tailgate carried me beyond the world of finance, mergers, IPOs, reversals, frustrations and inanities. And, in the space of a split second, life had...