@cdelalama
Yesterday the startup world lost one of its great ones, a generous community builder, in a fatal accident. I won't name him here. The people who loved him are grieving, and I don't want to make his loss about anything else. But it stayed with me all day, and it pushed a thought to the surface that most of us postpone too long: we rarely thank the people who quietly changed our lives until it's too late to do it. So I'm going to do it now, with someone who is very much still here. Today, Robert Scoble followed me. A small thing. He follows thousands of people. But it sent me back sixteen years, and I want to tell you why: In 2010 I quit my job. No plan, no idea what I wanted to build, and my wife was pregnant. I only knew I had to build something. I never went back to working for anyone else, and people like Robert are part of why I jumped. Back then I lived on entrepreneur blogs and videos, dreaming from Madrid about a place I'd never set foot in. I remember one of Robert's clearly: him driving around Palo Alto, interviewing Diann Eisnor about Waze. I had nothing. I just watched it and thought, I want to be there. I want to know people like that. I wish one day he would interview me. Two years later I was living in the Valley, in a hacker house called Black Box. The person who introduced me to Fadi, the man who ran it, was Diann, the same Diann I'd watched Robert interview from my couch. She and her partner Elíes took me in, and I lived in their home for years. They became family. Think about that for a second. Someone I'd watched on a screen from across the world, back when I was nobody with nothing, ended up being one of the most important people in my life. I never planned it. You never can. I even saw Robert once, at a Flipboard party in Palo Alto, and I was too intimidated to introduce myself. I thought he was too big a deal. It took me years to learn he's one of the most approachable people in the Valley, which, of course, is exactly the point. None of us see these threads while we're living inside them. They only turn visible looking back. The follow itself is a tiny thing. What it did was remind me I had never said thank you. But the loop is bigger than one follow. People like Robert, and others I've pointed to before and will keep pointing to, are the reason I do any of this. They were open and generous when they had no reason to be, and that is what made me want to become one of them. It is why I help build places like Startup Embassy, and now Frontier Tower, whose whole purpose is to help the ecosystem, inside Silicon Valley and far beyond it, all over the world. To take care of founders the way I was once taken care of. We help each other constantly, usually without ever knowing it. So thank you, @Scobleizer. For the push, for being reachable, and for showing me the kind of builder I wanted to become. Don't wait to tell people. Tell them now.
