1. That is a whole story by itself. The tl;dr version is Ryan used to run an exchange, cryptoaltex (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=485439.0) and hung out in our IRC channel. Somewhere down the road he decided to close down his exchange. He will claim it was cause we were out to steal his bike, but I think he got tired of all the nonsense that we as service owners had to deal with. Either way, it worked out for both of us cause we needed someone that understood the community and how to support an exchange and he was looking for something to do in his spare time.
2. Ahhh... a lot has changed in the last 2 months that hasn't been well publicized. Bill quit his job and has been full time on Bittrex since early May. Rami also took a sabbatical around the same time and I believe he is turning his notice in any day now as well. That leaves me the odd man out for now.
3. Honestly in this case, we may sell some of our SBD or convert it to SP. I don't know if I categorize that as trading since we aren't buying and selling for profit, but I guess some could construe it that way. We obviously do sell bitcoin to get USD to pay bills and when we start offering fiat trading, will probably use our own exchange to convert those funds. I'm sure a more official statement will be made when we get to that point.

Feel free to Q&A up, but if anyone has a topic that'd like to hear about, I'd like to hear those too...

thanks,
richie@bittrex