Moses says that Sitemason, now with a cleaner organizational chart, serves more than 600 customers. Moses serves as CEO and Lead Developer, while Thomas Conner , a fellow Vanderbilt grad who joined Moses in 1995 after a career in banking, is President and CFO. 

Moses says that next he'll continue shaping Sitemason "to make it more 'Web 2.0'." Moses says he began adding Web 2.0 features to Sitemason last spring, citing a new Custom Form tool customers can use to manage large workflows. Now, he says, Sitemason is "a combination of a content management system and a web app development platform." [Local firms' movement toward Web 2.0 should illuminate the substance beneath concept, currently somewhat shrouded by the cloud of statements pro , the arguments con and the general excitement and confusion. NTC's Feb. 2, 2006, Tech Roundtable will focus on "Web 2.0."]

Although born in Nashville 37 years ago this Halloween, Moses was reared in southern Minnesota, an area more known for cornfields than lakes, and returned to Nashville as a high-school junior when his research-physician father was recruited from the Mayo Clinic, back to Vanderbilt (where, among other things, the elder Moses helped start the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center). To grease the return to middle Tennessee, Moses' father catered to his son's already-intense love of computers and bought him his choice: a Mac 512K.

Moses earned his B.S. in computer sciences at Vanderbilt University in 1992.  Long before he graduated, he was working in the VU Computer Store and independently supporting and consulting to customers. By his Senior year, he'd formed Telasar Consulting, which later became Telasar Corporation, in which he partnered with Bill Butler (now, Butler Networks, and Tommy Williams (now a developer with WinFS). Then, with a "tiny" 1993 round of friends-and-family money, they formed Telalink, originally to enable customers to send files via ISDN, but very quickly to build and market an always-on network connecting customers with service bureaus. By early 1994, Moses says Telalink was playing hard against their "main rivals," ISDN-Net and Edge.net, and working steadily to position themselves against competitors as "young geeks" quicker to embrace new technologies.

Telalink teamed with ISDN-Net to form NREP , Nashville's first colocation facility (now wholly owned by ISDN-Net). In early 1999, Moses and partners sold Telalink (then $2.5 million annually) to PSINet Inc., the first commercial internet services provider. PSINet subsequently failed noisily. That failure led to the end of Telalink operations in early 2001, at which point rights to the Internet access customer base were sold to ISDN-Net.

In September 1999, after a token buyout of PSInet's interest in the development of tools for web designers, Moses and Conner funded the launch of Monster Labs, Inc., with Telalink employee Andrew Webber moving over as a partner to staff Monster Labs. (Moses says Webber left in 2004 to pursue an MBA.)  By New Year's Day 2001, Monster Labs launched a suite of six developer tools resident at Sitemason.com. Although that business was initially slow to establish momentum, the timely end of Monster Labs' noncompete with PSINet allowed them to get back into the web hosting business as Moses.com, balancing their portfolio.