I had a minority interest in iHub. They recruited me in '03 when they were negotiating to buy SI from InfoSpace. I had known Brad, Jeff to a lesser extent, Jill, Bob, and the other Jeff (Admin) starting in '96. I never knew Russ or any of the Go2Net or InfoSpace folks.
I had sold my own bricks and mortar business, and had been retired for a couple of years. When Bob approached me to help them save SI from oblivion, a did so gladly. And, gratuitously at first. I had some M&A experience, and some programming, albeit nothing web related. I wound up doing a lot of development and helped to get iHub more structured as it was growing quite rapidly.
Back in the '03 era, SI like many other InfoSpace properties was just running on unattended servers with little if any administration. At that time it was on a Sun/Oracle platform, and it was slowly falling apart a piece at a time due to lack of attention. Most of the boards were overrun with politics and personal attacks, so we took a hard stance, booting some of the true miscreants and barring political discussion from stock board. There was a lot of inertia that had to be overcome and it was a slow turn. There was also a very fast rewrite of SI done as Bob had a very limited time to get it off the InfoSpace platform, and none of us had any Oracle experience at all. It was truly a seat of the pants conversion, but it got done, such as it was.. Eventually the needs of the larger site took precedence, and SI was more or less left in maintenance mode again. Then both sites were sold to ADVFN. The rest is covered in your history. |
