Fragile
On July 13, 2012, Alex Okrent died from a heart attack. I didn’t know him personally, but we both worked on President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, and I was in the office the day he collapsed. He was only 29.
Many readers of this blog don’t know about this part of my life yet. After starting a second company, I wasn’t getting enough traction in a few things I had been experimenting with. In the middle of starting a new project, a friend of mine, Harper Reed, CTO of Obama for America, asked if I could put things on pause briefly and help with the campaign. There were a bunch of reasons to consider it. But even selfishly, I realized it was probably a good idea for me and my fledgling business to meet some new folks to collaborate with as well as see some more real world problems organizations and people are having that I could solve after the campaign. I’ve been in a pretty small...