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A Thank-You Never Sent.  It seems somehow tragic, and almost ironic, that certain people can impact your life with the smallest and most routine of ways -- an offhand comment here, a small suggestion there -- and that because the actions weren't grand or heroic, that their true impact could take years to be fully realized. Even worse when those realizations come too late to properly convey your gratitude. I heard this morning that Daniel Jacoby, co-founder and original CTO of Digital Insight, passed away on Saturday after a long battle with an inoperable brain tumor. I'd love to say that we were close friends -- it's certainly my loss that we weren't -- but the reality is that Daniel, more than just about anyone, accomplished his impact in very few total minutes. In the end, I'm left with a collection of moments that's already gotten significant "air time" in the quotings and retellings of those stories to others since then. In both the spirit of celebrating the life instead of mourning the loss, and the spirit of crediting the unnamed sources of my whatever wisdom I've found over the years, I thought quite a bit today about the brief time I spent working with Daniel. I first met Daniel in 1996 when he, at 30-ish, was running the technical side of a 20-person Internet banking startup, and I, at 22, was a young punk developer and consultant too arrogant to realize how unqualified I really was for that job. After a grueling interview which left me both thoroughly impressed with Daniel and utterly convinced that I didn't get the job, I was quite surprised when Daniel called with an offer, and even more shocked when he stepped up to match a Hollywood studio's offer at every step (ending in a salary Daniel's successor told me he would never have offered to someone with my experience). His willingness to hire me, in retrospect, turned out to be a rather big fork in the road that pretty seriously changed my life. Of course, I wasn't yet smart enough to see that, so a few days later, the glam of Hollywood had won out, and I called Daniel to politely decline the offer. "We're moving into our new office," he told me enthusiastically, "so just come see this place before you decide." Out of both courtesy and curiosity, I drove out to Camarillo to see a 10,000 square foot space filled with boxes around the edges, far too few cubicles for the space, and an excited Daniel proudly showing me around the office and talking about how great this was going to be. Truth is, I didn't see it. At all. I saw a haphazard and struggling garage venture, and it couldn't compete with the glam of a world-renowned Hollywood studio on the other side. It wasn't until years later, when I'd moved on to my own start-up and was excitedly showing a hot-shot young developer around our even smaller and even more sparsely populated office that I suddenly got it. I saw a sparsely-populated office back then at DI, while Daniel saw what ultimately became the leading Internet banking company with 800+ employees and millions of users nationwide at thousands of client banks. All in all, that was a pretty good summary of my interactions with Daniel; it took me years to understand his warnings and wisdom, and even then, often only after falling on my face. He'd asked me point-blank when trying to talk me out of the competing Hollywood job, for example, what I really wanted to do and whether that company was the kind of place where I could. A year later, miserable in a job talking about technology but doing very little of it, learning very little, and struggling with office politics, I sheepishly went back to take the DI offer. At that point, Daniel had recently been diagnosed with this cancer, and had taken a leave of absence, leaving the dev team in the capable hands of his boss from his previous job. So with his treatment in progress, we obviously saw little of Daniel, though later he'd come in from time to time, advising us in project direction, noticeable sometimes even in the smallest of ways. I always laugh remembering one evening when I ran out to Jack in the Box at 5:30pm, an all-too-common occurrence upon suddenly realizing I hadn't eaten all day, and got back to find Daniel standing there, shaking his head. "That stuff'll kill you," he said quietly, still shaking his head. He was right, of course, but the way he said it suddenly made it seem as as obvious as if I were shooting heroin. (Meanwhile, a leading urologist at UCLA was running extensive tests to determine why my uric acid levels were high enough to give me four attacks of kidney stones in eighteen months.) Many of my other interactions with Daniel brought work-related lessons that I continue to draw upon today. Two weeks ago, after completing an eight-month project and getting ready to start QA debugging, I was telling our developers about Daniel's deal at the end of a major DI project. For each bug we fixed, Daniel would give us a set amount of money, but would be reviewing the bug-list to make sure we weren't "coding ourselves a mini-van." :-) After completion, the money went for a big party for the dev team. And even a few times towards the end of the project, when disagreements would arise over scope or schedules, we'd plead our case to Daniel knowing that his approval was the respected trump card to support our mere opinions. He was the expert; we were the novices. Even my first real exposure to XML was discussing with Daniel how it could replace a similar spec he'd created years earlier. And after everyone I knew at that point (even at prior jobs) had disagreed with me, Daniel was the first person to agree with my idea for a modular server-based architecture to replace the CGI framework we were using (and added his own ideas of how we could move from AIX to Solaris with that as well). Even though I didn't stay long enough to build that out, that approval -- that someone like Daniel thought it could work -- started me on my way to several years of work on modular server-side architectures. But my favorite memory -- and in retrospect, the sweetest, I think -- had to be a lunch we had in late 1997, after I'd unilaterally created an internal utility, resulting in an inundation of support duties that were simply burning me out to the point of impending resignation. There on the frazzled edge, I was even more unnerved when Daniel and the VP/Development came to take me out to lunch. Convinced I was getting fired, I instead heard the coolest story from the VP about another young programmer at his last company -- Daniel! -- who'd taken it upon himself to create an internal utility (a customer service app, I think?) and how, caught in the situation I was now facing, the on-going support issues had taught him the important lesson that no good deed goes unpunished. :-) The reality, of course, is that I'd messed up pretty badly and created a horrible mess, but here were these guys -- two ninja coders -- showing me that it was common over-optimism, a mistake made even by those I respected. And instead of firing me, they took me out to lunch, and taught me a lesson that resonates even now (weekly, in fact), and the VP himself stepped in to code me out of my disaster. So many times, we talk about people after they're gone, with well-meaning platitudes about how they'll live on in our lives and in our thoughts. Daniel, on the other hand, had an impact that defies forgetting, both in the personal little stories we continue to tell and in the great big achievements (and companies) he left behind. We will always remember, and I -- only one among many, no doubt -- will be eternally grateful. Thank you. // 03.15.2004 2:32pm //