My friend Gene Kan died on June 29. Gene, a developer who was critical in writing the first free software implentations of Gnutella, co-founded Infrasearch around the same time I helped start OpenCola. We enjoyed a weird kind of rivalry as fellow P2P bigmouths, but we also used to hook up for lunch and bitch about the way our financiers screwed us and how much we hated our day-jobs. Gene was the only P2P entrepreneur I ever met who was more bitter than me, and we made good company for one another. We’d end up on the same bill at conferences in every hemisphere and we’d always find ourselves getting together to see the sights in Munich, London, Boston… As the two sneering intellectual-property-radical punk kids at these events, we were natural company for one another.
I just found out about this from a friend who spotted it on a blog, then I happened upon this obit, written by one of Gene’s co-founders from Infrasearch. Goodbye, Gene.
Gene was a unique individual. He was quiet and perceptive, kind and honest, possessing a quick wit and a questioning mind. During the last two years we made good and bad decisions, were happy and sad at the same moments, and after selling InfraSearch always wanted to work together again. Gene Kan, my best friend, tragically passed away on June 29th, 2002.
I knew Gene not through articles or interviews. I knew him as the guy I could call when I was having trouble changing a flat tire – and as someone who would say “stay right there, I’ll be there in ten minutes.” He was the guy I could ask if my tie was correctly knotted or what his thoughts on the Israeli Prime Minister were. He was someone that would check his character judgements with me and someone who would start whispering to me a hilarious idea in the middle of a boring meeting. In this land of minute friendships started at “events” and held up by lunch meetings, I’ve experienced two emotions that are equally impossible to describe: happiness to have called him my friend and the overwhelming, all-devouring sense of loss.