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.

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 behind the scenes.