I am married with 3 wonderful boys ages 6-13. All three play musical instruments. The younder two play piano and the oldest plays guitar and wants to be the next Kurt Cobain, hopefully withouth the bad stuff. This is actually the 4th business I have started. The first one was back in 1987 selling electronics on the web; I think my site name was tv.com. Had I stuck with it I would have retired about 10 years ago. The second business I started was called iTaxback, I am not good at selling and that one didn't go so well. I started a business selling ice cream from a kiosk in Mankato, MN (that one didn't go to well either), not sure what I was thinking about trying to sell ice cream in the coldest state in the country, coffee would have been better. I almosted started an online dating site called date.com back in 1988 but my wife wouldn't let me spend any money to start the site because she thought it was crazy that people would actually find dates and correspond via the internet. She is right about a lot of things but this wasn't one of them. Had I started that site, I would have retired about 12 years ago. I basically have a two track mind; I am either thinking about businesses to start or .....well you get the picture. I had the idea for smashbay.com about a year ago on a flight back from Belgium. I wanted to create a site that had every internet user on the planet, so it would be easy to find people. There are several people in my past I would like to check in on and see how they are doing. I thought it would be great to have one site where you could type in someones name, like "Mark Roche" and all the "Mark Roches" in the world would get an email from the site stating that "Sean Gillespie" an old Navy bud was looking for them and allow them an easy way to make contact. By the way, Mark Roche really is an old Navy bud and he is about 40 now. I haven't seen him in about 15 years and we were once really great friends. He grew up in Elko, NV and I think his dad taught at the local high school and passed away several years ago. I figured the only way to get every user on the planet on one site was to pay them. Anyway, I did a bunch of research and came across these affiliate programs that are being used by virtually every company doing business on the internet and thought, wow, this is the perfect way to pay people to join a site. Initially I was going to track each persons activity and only offer them 90% of the commissions they generated back. I estimated that the average user would generate about $200 per year in commissions and then thought the problem would be, 1) people don't like their activity tracked and 2) how excited will people get over the potential to make and additional $200. So, I decided to not track individual usage and just pool the money into one big pot and then pay each person based on how many people they had in their 4 generation hierarchy (downline) in relation to all the other members and make it free for everyone to join. Now, everyone can join for free, and they have the potential to make millions of dollars per year, once the site gets bigger. Using the payout by the downline concept, I also figured all the members would be encouraged to tell others (so they could get more money) but I wanted to be able to do some additional advertising, so I implemented the "random generator" that places people randomly into member downline's and not at the top. The site is still a little rough; once we exceed 10,000 members, I promise the shopping will get much easier - think Amazon. I also think that this site can take over the pay per click industry once we exceed a million members - think Google; shortly after that we will all be retired. We don't currently have pay per click on the site and that is because none of the pay per click programs will allow me to pay any of the money back to you, the members. I plan on changing that in the future and creating our own pay per click program. But that is down the road. Let's see, I grew up in Bakersfield, California and joined the Navy at 18. I spent 8 years in the Navy as a Nuke ET (if that means anything to anyone). I obtained my bachelors and masters degree while on active duty. My first "real" job was with Frito-Lay in Bakersfield, CA. I worked for Levi Strauss in Henderson, NV, Nestle Ice Cream back in Bakersfield again, Kraft Foods in New Ulm, MN and I am currently employed by a wonderful company in Zebulon, NC where we manufacture synthetic corks for the wine industry and I get to travel to Europe a few times each year. I am also an adjunct instructor for the University of Phoenix where I teach in class and online courses. My passion is fishing, I love to fish, especially for walleye. I am trying to get into striper fishing here in North Carolina but have not had any success as of yet. I welcome any emails from anyone. My email address is sean@smashbay.com Thanks for reading my bio! :>