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This is a bit belated, but I’m very pleased to officially announce that Laurie Voss (@seldo) has joined the Snowball team as our technical lead.

I first met Laurie when we hired him to join the Yahoo! Widgets team in early 2007. While I’m not sure he always felt the same way, I liked Laurie from the start: he’s extremely intelligent and hard-working, yet he’d be the last person to acknowledge either. And most importantly to me, he loves what he does and takes great pride in it. I know that if I can convince Laurie to get excited about something, it’s a genuinely good idea.

When I decided to start down this road, Laurie was my first choice as technical co-founder. I remember taking him to dinner and telling him the idea and being greatly relieved when he thought I might be on to something . Unfortunately, U.S. immigration law prohibited Laurie, a UK citizen who was at the time on an L-1 visa with Yahoo!, from joining right away. So, after going it alone (with much help from our friends at Cloudspace) for over a year and more hoop-jumping than I care to think about right now, I can’t express how pleased I am to finally be working side-by-side with the partner I wanted.

Laurie brings to the team the technical expertise to turn our early efforts into scalable platforms, the passion for the web to help us deliver truly compelling products, and the patience to deal with me . We’re both very excited about what we’re building and how we think it will be valuable to others.

You can read Laurie’s much more eloquent account of how we got here and where we’re going on his blog. And if you find the challenges we faced in teaming up as ridiculous as we do, please support the Startup Visa movement (Laurie will be blogging a fuller account of his immigration odyssey just as soon as we ship a couple new things ). Finally, we’re also looking for a kick-ass Back-End Engineer to join our growing team. So, please spread the word.