I'd like to comment a little on the OP.
Maybe it seems a little long-winded, haha. I wonder how many people read the whole thing from start to finish without skipping anything? But when I wrote it up, the details were important! I don't think one can appreciate all the hard work that goes into starting a site like ES from scratch. One would have to be completely obsessed with it. There were just tons of major complications - problems that needed to be solved which had never been solved before. There was no blueprint to follow. These guys had to figure things out themselves. And all that is what made the site unique. It made the site attention-grabbing. Imagine building something which is the best of the best? It is a very, very difficult thing to accomplish.
The other thing that fascinates me is the growth of the membership. The site went live in June of 2000, and yet, it took almost two years for ES to reach 1,000 members. That was May 2002. And although 1,000 doesn't seem like a particularly large number, I'm sure there was exponential growth during those two years. 100, 200, 400, 800... like that. So, with 1,000 members in May 2002, ES hit 2,000 members in November 2002, just six months later! That's pretty amazing! Then it hit 4,000 members a year later in November of 2003, 8,000 members in February 2004, 15,000 members in July 2004, and 30,000 members in March 2005. And it seems apparent to me that this continued exponential growth was a direct result stemming from the hard work the original staff AND the carefully chosen new staff put into the site - making ES the best and keeping ES the best. It wasn't so much the build at that point - I think it was the unique style of management that the staff imposed on each other, and also the mutual trust and respect the staff afforded each other. Again - it was a unique style of management, rare, and I think it was kind of ingenious.
The merge with the team was in August 2005.
I deliberately excluded the name of the "team representative" who helped finalize the merge. That was twenty years ago. And even today, I'm not sure if naming him is appropriate. But there are a lot of fun stories there.
The membership hit 60,000 in August 2006. But then, interestingly, the exponential nature of membership growth seemed to begin to come to an end. We can theorize why.
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