Web exec is a man of many dimensions.

Employees at Cary-based NxView Technologies enjoy perks such as pet insurance, a pool table and an on-call masseuse. But there's one request that CEO Myles Owens won't grant: cots. "I just don't want that to be part of our culture," he says. "There has got to be some level of work/life balance."

Variety is important to the 39-year-old Owens. He holds a black belt in tae kwon do, coaches his 6-year-old son's T-ball team and hates missing a game. These days, he's head of a start-up that makes three-dimensional Web applications. But in his college days, the Dayton, Ohio, native spun Top 40 singles as a disk jockey in Florida; spun stories as "director" of a one-man, radio-news department in Tell City, Ind.; called football and basketball games; wrote for the newspaper there; and eventually got a bachelor's in rhetorical theory from Ohio State University in 1985. He got a law degree there in 1988 -- aided by a scholarship endowed by golfer Jack Nicklaus.

It wasn't for his game (though he insists, "I don't embarrass myself.") but a tournament he organized as a first-year law student. Nicklaus, an Ohio State alumnus, set up the scholarship for former golf-team members, but none had claimed it for several years, so the law-school dean persuaded him to give it to Owens.

After graduating, Owens joined Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM Corp. as an intellectual-property lawyer in Dallas, then Detroit. He left in...