Today is my first anniversary with Crowd Fusion.  At times I'm astounded with what we accomplished in one year, at times I'm disappointed we aren't further along.  We've built a great Platform. We've prepared ourselves to launch some great brands.  We've secured funding. We've had hundreds of hours of discussions detailing where the platform is headed.  We're building a great business, quality code, and timely brands.  We've even got some worthy adversaries popping up.  One thing we haven't been able to accomplish is stop the press from calling us CrowdFusion as one word. Big Gripe Right ;-)

The thing I'm most proud of is the people we've brought on board.  Brian and I never could have imagined, when we started envisioning how to build out our Crowd Fusion team, that we would find the terrific team that we are assembling.  There were individuals we hoped would come ask to work with us, Judith Meskill and Steve Friedman.   We've been able to cherry pick some superb talent from people we've worked with more than 1 job ago like Veronique Christensen and Randall Bennett.  

The big unknown was the tech team.  We knew we'd start everyone as contractors and look for people that fit our mold.  Timing couldn't be better when we started working with Ryan Scheuermann, he was looking to get out of the contractor racket and had terrific experience building CMS structures on top of Blog Platforms.  Soon people Ryan had worked with in the past were interested in Crowd Fusion and Russell Werner joined the team.  We continue to work with great contractors as well Nicholas Hance, Kyle Sollenberger, Gary Bacon II, George Vilches, and Brian Phillips. 

This team is growing daily and they are what is making our platform and brands great. 

I should do another post about friends of Crowd Fusion.  Having people that are rooting for you is the most rewarding.   I'll never mention everyone, but thanks to the Emurse Team, Alex, Gavin, Michael, and Mike.  All of Indy Hall, Alex and Bart.  And all of Blogsmith - too many to mention.  I'd better not forget Jason Calacanis, Velocity Interactive Group, Greycroft, and Marc Andreesen.  Thank you for believing in us.

Year Two is going to kick ass.  I can't wait to launch our first vertical site.  Stay tuned.

Updated:  Thank you Christoph Khouri for being one of the most loyal friends of Crowd Fusion and for being an all around great Guy.