The Day I found out Randy Pausch Died

For those of you who don’t know Randy Pausch, do yourself a favor: block off 80 minutes, and go watch this.  76 minutes for the video, 4 more to wipe the tears from your face and blow your nose.  Seriously.  If “the second head fake” doesn’t make you tear up, check your pulse.

I left EMC to start on MessageSling in December of 2007.  By mid July 2008, things were in full swing. We had raised $50k, moved into some office space, hired a junior developer and had just been accepted to DEMOfall08.  Things were going well.

I was on a camping trip that weekend.  It was planned by friends of my girlfriend at the time.  We drove up to somewhere in NH, camped out for a couple nights, and rode down the Saco River in between.  Weather was pretty nice, people were friendly, there was plenty of beer, and I was fucking miserable.

Not because I got sunburned or forgot my sleeping bag.  I was miserable because I didn’t have broadband.  By this time we already had customers.  We had the eyes of DEMO looking at our product.  But since this was “My Very First Rails App ©” there were no tests, random exceptions (syntax errors being checked into production were not uncommon), poor process & system monitoring on EC2 (what’s monit?).  Basically, anything could go down at any time, so we had to be constantly on alert.  The way Scot and I split the technical work up, the phones were his domain, and the web was mine. There was really no “hey keep an eye on things for me while I’m gone” — there was nobody that could keep an eye on things.  It was always on both of us.

I couldn’t sleep the second night.  Around 5am, the sun started to come up, and I decided that trying to get any sleep was hopeless.  I cracked open my Blackberry and started reading my RSS feed.  That’s when I saw that Randy Pausch had just died a few days earlier.

I put my phone down, rolled over in my sleeping bag, and started to cry.  But not because I was sad for Randy.

For those of you who didn’t take my advice and watch Randy’s talk, a quick rundown. It’s about following your childhood dreams.  Randy was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006.  In late 2007, as part of an ongoing series of talks at CMU called “The Last Lecture Series,” Randy talked about realizing childhood dreams.  At that point, he had gone through all of the available procedures, and his prognosis was terminal. Despite that, he gave the most inspiring, energetic, brilliant, moving talk that I have ever seen.

So why was I crying?  I was in this cold tent.  Miserable.  Tired.  Nervous.  Stressed out. I had just wasted a weekend bitching about everything, pissing off my girlfriend, being mean to all her friends, and “worst of all” not getting any work done.  And suddenly I’m confronted with the death of a guy who looked TERMINAL CANCER in the face, held up his middle finger to it as he laughed and used his last lecture to tell the entire world to enjoy life to the fullest and achieve their dreams.  

FUCK.

A startup can be a destructive force.  Not only did MessageSling destroy my bank accounts, strain my relationships, and affect my health (I gained weight during this time), but that morning I realized something even more terrible was happening: my beloved startup had started to chip away at my spirit.  Unacceptable.

I wish I could say I flipped a switch and all was better after that day, but it wasn’t. Those realizations, just like realizations of being overweight or lazy, don’t mean that the problem will just fall away.  But you can’t fix a problem until you’re aware it exists. Until that day, I was blind to what was happening to me.  Afterwards, I was aware.

It’s been almost two years since that morning in NH.  It was pretty crappy, but I wouldn’t do a thing differently if I could do it over again.  Because over the last two years I’ve learned the hard way that the day’s moral is more than just a witty one-liner to finish a blog post:

Moral:  Be cool.  It’s a business.  It’s not a war.  It’s not cancer.  It’s not AIDS.  The stresses involved in your business are rarely (almost never) worth screwing up the rest of your life.  Be cool.