author I’m really excited to announce that Josh Darnell has been appointed to the FBS Board of Directors. You may recall that Josh joined our Development Team in 2015 and he’s been helping us build our new desktop customer portal since then, as well as recently help us collaborate with RESO on the new Web API Update specification. As I mentioned in 2015:
Many of you likely know Joshua from his work with several other companies in the industry, including Heartland MLS, Terradatum/Homeseekers/FNRES (back in the XMLSweb days), and as the founder of Kurotek Consulting, which has worked with Clareity Security and others in the MLS industry. . . Joshua brings a wealth of industry knowledge to FBS as well as world-class development expertise, specializing in Ruby on Rails development (as well as Java and many other platforms), which is the core development platform for FBS’s Spark API and Flexmls Web MLS and IDX products.
I’d also like to take this opportunity to highlight what I think is an incredibly cool part of FBS being an employee-owned company. Because we’re employee-owned, we also want employee-owners to be on the FBS Board, and so we have three inside and three outside directors to balance the Board. In addition to myself, the two other employee-owner directors are Cal Heldenbrand and now Josh. Prior employee-owner directors have been Greg Kilwein (our VP of Development, who just vacated his seat), Jaison Freed (VP of Hosting), Josh Murray (API Development Team Lead), and Matt O’Brien (Senior Web Developer).
As the Trustee of our ESOP, I appoint both the inside and outside directors, but, for the inside directors, my selection is informed almost exclusively by a vote of the employees. For example, in the vote Josh just won, we had eight candidates vying for the seat. This level of interest and participation by employees in the future direction of FBS is critical to our success as an employee-owned company, and so I’m very thankful for everyone’s participation.
I also want to say thanks to our outside directors as well, who currently are Peter Shuttleworth (former CEO of MetroMLS in Milwaukee and a CMLS Hall of Famer), Steve Malme (Senior Director at Microsoft), and Christy Spokely (CEO of Extreme CRM). We’re incredibly honored to have such experienced, articulate, and passionate Directors leading FBS.