robovortex is literally someone at the company with direct knowledge why are you fighting them
Nobody is âfightingâ here. They are having a conversation about a relevant detail in this thread.
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Somebody working at a privately held company will not necessarily know the owner agreements or who has real power on the board. With a small number of owners, board meetings might be infrequent and little relevance to how the company is run. I am not disputing anything that has been said.
Part me wonders if Tony stepping down has anything to do with postings on CD. It might be he is doing it for reasons of his own and the timing is coincidence. I have no knowledge one way or the other.
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Everything is about Tonyâs regressions, but what about Bob? Even though he isnât mentioned as being a sexual predator. Iâm sure he wasnât oblivious as to what was going on. Both of them should go.
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The political ecosystems of small-medium cities are mind-numbingly intracate and counter-intuative, usually built on decades of business relationships and cornered on events that only a handful of people even remember (ask me how I know).
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Thatâs most of it. People here are also googling Greenville and coming up with assumptions about the town --but itâs a low income rural area outside where all the development is taking place in Dallas. The point Iâm trying to make here is just because L3 is by far the biggest employer which people have said several times doesnât mean the high income earners live in Greenville or even Hunt County --I suspect a lot of high income earners who work in Greenville actually live in the nicer suburbs like Royse City and Rockwall with better schools, city services, etc⌠Iâm also not saying that the plant manager of L3 doesnât have the same level of influence as Tony --we just know Tony has clearly abused that influence.
The other thing is I bet if you look up the highest property values in the City of Greenville youâd find Tony owning some of the highest appraised property in the city. I think thatâs why heâs been able to get away with it for so long (It = control/influence over police, city officials, etcâŚ).
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Also remember that the two board members are locals as well. They went to the local high school. They have a lot of personal ties to the area.
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Dan Mantz (@dm_recf) has posted RECF update on vexforum:
https://www.vexforum.com/t/update-to-rec-foundation-community-december-9-2022/110094?u=technik3k
To which I have replied with a message copied below. I guess, whether the moderators approve it or not will serve as one of the indicators of how serious they are about implementing the real changes at IFI.
Dan,
Thank you for volunteering with the update. I am cautiously optimistic that you could shed the dependence on VEX Robotics monopoly in the competitive robotics space occupied by VRC.
Will we be able to see something like this in the near future? 
https://www.vexforum.com/t/restricting-or-allowing-using-non-vex-made-parts/83121/6
I wish you could work with CREATE Foundation and move RECF away from being perceived as the sales vehicle for IFI, towards philosophy of encouraging creativity and openness, just as they put it in the title of their competitions.
Seriously, in my opinion, dependence on VEX Robotics as the sole provider of competition legal electronics and their influence on game design and competition format (where they could easily amend the rules to increase their quarterly sales) is the biggest risk factor in survival of the educational robotics programs administered by RECF.
I cannot stress it enough, how the lack of real changes at IFI is an absolute showstopper for me and many other mentors to continue being associated with VRC in the next season.
It should be no surprise to you that many of us are doing contingency planning to switch our teams to FTC, while preserving our current investment with mechanical parts we already have.
It should also be no surprise to you that many of the mentors and students are unhappy with reliability record of current generation of Vex electronic components and unwillingness of GDC to allow things like the V5 ESD protection board.
All those little things (like the penalty free pneumatics rule) add up over time and the lack of proper response from IFI leadership regarding the latest misconduct allegations makes it the final straw for us to pull the trigger.
Edit: Corrected vexforum topic links.
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Not only that, but L3 is an enormous company which employs nearly 50,000 people at over 70 locations. I suspect they view their Greenville office as more of a building in a void than they view it as a central part of a community.
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Would it surprise anyone to learn that VEX EPs have to deal with these issues as well?
In a 22 team event, weâve so far had 3 dead ports on teamâs controllers preventing them from connecting to the field (all ESD related we believe) and weâve damaged 4 ports on the field controller this season (out of 20, we need 4 functional ports to run an event, but they need to be in separate banks of 5).
And now with the VEXforum changes, we canât PM the VEX / Tournament Manager employees directly with event troubles. We can ping REC with rules questions and such, but have absolutely no way to address technical issues with VEX, and the new field control system they introduced last year seems to have just as many ESD issues (itâs based on a V5 brain with seemingly no changes).
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Lawyer here. Secretary is most typically a corporate officer. Officers can be board members, or not. They are usually hired or appointed by the board. But these things depend on State law, and can sometimes be changed by the corporate bylaws.
Without reading the bylaws and knowing the relevant state law, we canât know if the individual identified as âsecretaryâ is a board member. Also, the website may or may not provide a way to indicate that someone is both a director and secretary, so whoever filled out the form may have had to choose one.
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In this case I know there are only two board members. I proved my claim by showing the latest filing from the Texas secretary of state. They are Tony and Bob. It is listed unambiguously as per the instructions of the secretary of state. No other name is shown with the word DIRECTOR ahead of it. Iâm not sure why this is a question. The official report issued by the secretary of state does not list Warren Weeks as DIRECTOR. He is listed as CFO. All officers and all directors are required to be listed. The form allows every executive and every director to be named separately, and as you can see, Bob and Tony are listed as DIRECTORS and their other titles are listed as well.
We do not even know where jaredhk got the image he posted. It does not match what I found on the website, nor the document in the public records for IFI at the secretary of state office as I have obtained on Dec. 4, 2022 and am posting here.
But I would like to take it further with my opinion: the number of board members may as well be one - Tony - because Bob seems to bow out of business and corporate decisions as far as weâve seen and confirmed by others here. Bob has certainly allowed Tony to do everything whistleblowers are reporting on this site. The CEO works for the board of directors, and can and will be fired if they donât operate in the way the board of directors (Tony) wants.
Because of that, I want everyone to know that so long as the board still has Tony on it, then he is essentially in complete control of the company as he as always been. Stepping down as CEO will not change a single thing. No one is safe from the toxicity and abuse so long as Tony remains on the board.
I think that you can disagree with my opinion about Tony being the only real board member, and that IFI is tricking you, but I am flummoxed that you can argue with the number of board members. It couldnât be more clear an unambiguous.
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I have no need to continue litigating this conversation as both my points and yours are inconsequential to the conversation, and I agree with the substance of much of your post. Sorry that my observation derailed this thread so much â itâs surprising to me that weâre seeing so much action on the topic of corporate governance.
I do just want to clear up this point, though:
Because I absolutely cited my source:
Regardless, can we agree to move on? It doesnât seem that folks are interested in my observations and theyâre so inconsequential to the topic at hand, that I shouldnât have replied in the first place and we should just move on.
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Question for someone on the inside, do you think that Tony no longer being in control of the companyâs day to day operations will change the workplace? Yes he will still have cont over the company, but if he isnât in the office every day. I would hope that he isnât able to continue to do the damage he has done on the scale he has.
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That thread is locked now
yay
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Tfw you donât want to accidentally invite the airing of more dirty laundry
Reminds me of when you email HR and they they always call you back to make sure thereâs not a record of it.
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records calls with HR
gottem
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It doesnât surprise me that âweâre seeing so much action on the topic of corporate governance.â That is the entire point of my post - that Tony resigning as CEO is just for show, because, due to the corporate governance structure of IFI, Tony will still remain in charge.
If Tony remained on the board and there were three members, it would be bad, but not nearly as bad as the reality that I am trying to alert you to: that there are only two members, which is a tie, but in this case Bob has demonstrated he backs down, so Tony always gets his way. Their corporate governance structure means Tony is still 100% in charge even if he is not CEO.
So everything you brought up is critical to the point I am trying to make, because it relates to the degree to which everyone is being fooled by Tonyâs resignation as CEO.
Legally, IFI has two board members. In my opinion, it operates as if there were one board member, Tony. The board hires and fires the CEO. Therefore, Tony will be in control of the CEO, and therefore in control of the toxic and abusive environment. And nowhere has it been stated that Tony wonât continue to show up at work every day, and the CEO could do nothing to stop it so long as Tony can fire them.
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Seriously, why feed/respond to troll accounts 
? (troll account has been suspended and replies deleted).
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