The Question and Answer Board

[Bob Zumbrunnen]

To all:

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Matt Brown and I have teamed up to take Investors Hub into the future.

The site is now running in Kansas City on a pair of decent machines (specs divulged to any geeks who ask) and a very fat pipeline to the internet.

Yes, I'm the "test user" who's been posting lately while testing various fixes and changes I've been making. If you want to see a list of fixes/changes that I've done so far, use http://www.investorshub.com/boards/progtasks.asp (which I may or may not keep online).

Matt and I have continued a dialogue since I left several months ago and we both share the same vision of not only what message boards should be, but the differences between right and wrong.

My role with the company is President and CEO. Matt is the company's Chairman and Vice President of Communities. We purposely structured it so that we're essentially peers with different responsibilities working toward the same goals.

In a nutshell, Matt will continue to be the Admin of the site and will deal with everything customer-related. In my opinion, he's extremely good at it and not only do I not need to be involved in this process, I'm frankly very relieved to not have that responsibility.

My job will entail basically "everything else". Programming and turning this into a profitable, enjoyable endeavor for all involved. In a way, it could be said that my goal is to see to it that Matt someday enjoys the non-stop feeling of being overwhelmed that I once felt at SI. <g>

Let me stress again that I am not going to be an Admin here. I don't want the job, Matt and I have agreed that I won't do it, and I'm darned happy to not have to. I won't get involved in disputes and will NOT override any of Matt's decisions, so please don't ask me to. My plate is going to be full enough, thank you very much.

I want to take this opportunity to publicly thank my best friend, John Hutton, without whom this changeover couldn't have possibly happened as quickly as it did. Despite my being a geek for many years, I bow in his presence because I know when I'm in the presence of the King of Geeks.

Regarding programming changes, I usually prefer to just let the deed say the thing and not say too much about what I'm working on, and not build up anyone's expectations and especially not say when I expect something to be done (as a programmer, I know that if a programmer gives a delivery date, he's lying), but here's a list, anyway, of what things are highest on my priority list:

1. Message-text searching
2. Tightening/optimizing/standardizing existing code and database
3. User control over certain aspects of the interface

None of the above will be done soon. Period. Some of it will be rolled out a little at a time and most of you likely won't notice.

This is in addition to squashing any bugs and doing any quickie additions I (or you) think of like the new "Hot" pages. http://www.investorshub.com/boards/hot.asp

In closing, I'd like to say I'm really excited to team up with Matt and take on the business side of running a board again, and interacting with everyone without being the big, bad Admin.

Any questions or comments?

Bob Zumbrunnen
President, Investors Hub