About Us, simply here for Dan
Our reasons for establishing this tribute website are simple: We want to represent Dan wherever we go and we want to do what he unfortunately can no longer do. His last 10 years on this earth were driven with one goal and responsibility: BrickLink.com and its now more than a million users -- LEGO buyers and sellers -- who rely on it for their hobbies, their recreation, and many for their very livelihoods.
It was a heavy burden -- a happy one to be sure -- but a huge obligation and responsibility for Dan. He shouldered it all alone. One of the biggest surprises people have is that one man was responsible for all that was BrickLink.com for a decade, from June 19, 2000 to September 24, 2010. To say he ate, slept and lived BrickLink would be an understatement. It was his life, until the end.
Eliska Jezkova (Dan's mom) and I (Larry Hawthorne, Dan's stepdad) carried on after him for nearly three years. Eliska was devoted to continuing Dan's dream and protecting what he worked so hard to establish. It wasn't always easy. Unlike Dan, we needed help from outside consultants, part-time IT, and a team of volunteer administrators who were critical in helping us keep the lights on. Most on BrickLink did not even know Dan's name, but everyone knew who "Admin" was. After his passing, the Admin position was filled by more than one person, a feat that Dan was able to accomplish all by himself.
Like Dan, our days were filled with managing BrickLink. We had little time for anything else. As BrickLink continued to grow it was apparent new resources were needed. Eventually, after nearly three years, we more than doubled the size and scope of the website and then handed over BrickLink to Jay Kim with heavy stipulation and understanding of where BrickLink had been and where it would be going.
Jay and Marvin Park and his team expanded and raised BrickLink to a higher level, just as we had hoped. Development and implementation of Stud.io software and the AFOL Designer Program are just a couple examples of how far the BrickLink website has grown and flourished. In fact, the value of this AFOL-dedicated website has led to LEGO Group itself acquiring BrickLink, early in 2020. It is hard to imagine that BriickLink, now in its silver anniversary year, could draw a more emblematic compliment than that.
We are thrilled with that outcome. We worked too hard to not see BrickLink succeed beyond our time running the website. Preserved today is still the world's largest LEGO online marketplace and we are both proud of that fact, and eternally grateful to those who helped us reach that goal.
What we do have now is time. And we are filling it with travels to spread the word about BrickLink and to pay tribute to the memory of Dan and his life and his life's dream, BrickLink. This website is about that, pure and simple.
One of our visits was to this wonderful expansive private exhibit of hundreds
of MOCs in, of all places, Prague. It's called Brickrepublic.
While attending Brickvention 2019, Melbourne, Australia, Eliska was interviewed by Josh Hanlon, with Beyond the Brick. Click here to see her tell the story of Dan and the creation of BrickLink.com.
Badges, lanyards, ID cards and the like are a lasting and treasured remembrance of our journeys.
Our recent "legacy visits" as we call them include 
We were honored to help kick off Brickvention 2019 as guest speakers. Eliska and I told the story of BrickLink and how Dan Jezek's failed job search provided the spark needed to launch the world's most successful online LEGO marketplace.