In early August, Mark Hendrickson from TechCrunch interviewed me for an article he was writing on hosted white-label social networking services. Once he got the idea he summed up the company as “You’re a one-man Ning.”

I immediately corrected him, “I’ve got a second person starting tomorrow.” Then I went on to explain all the ways that our product and goals were different. That second person is Jay Laney and we’ve essentially run as a two-person shop ever since.

Jay looks like this:

He’s a Graduate of O’Reilly where he used to be Lead Engineer for their online group. We worked together there on a lot of things, including a social network for alpha geeks that never quite got off the ground.

He’s also a graduate of Marc Hedlund, having spent time getting Wesabe established.

Jay built the Bad Online Dates site, our first custom site built on the CrowdVine platform. It’s going gangbusters. He’s also responsible for a slew of CrowdVine improvements: OpenID, backups, our deploy system, this blog, friends from other CrowdVines, and a bunch more that don’t make sense publicly.