A creator of futures - Terry created mine.

The poet Rilke said “The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.”

Terry found me 22 years ago in March of 2000. I was a senior at Harvard and had just written an article for Wired magazine about starting a dorm room dot com.?

He happened to read it, and then emailed me that he’d like to meet. I’ll never forget. We met at Finagle-a-Bagel in Harvard Square. He wore leather driving gloves and rumpled clothes, and it crossed my mind that I might be buying him the bagel.

It turned out he wanted to invest. A few months later and just 3 days after I graduated from college, he invested in my first company. He would at times visit me in California. He drove his Ferrari there from Massachusetts. We had a solid exit a few years later, but that was just the beginning of our relationship.

I still remember driving up from NJ with my wife Kerri to visit him, now about 18 years ago. I had another idea for a startup.

While my wife drove, I wrote the business plan, then we had to find a Kinko’s to print it. I thought the idea was pretty good. He invested again — even though it just so many words on paper.?

Terry made it clear he was betting on the jockey, not the horse. That was good, because a few months later I changed the horse, changing the entire concept of the company, deciding instead to build an early social network, myYearbook. The company would grow and grow and grow.?

Terry served on the Board. We would take myYearbook public. Terry remained on the board for a decade, even when we were NASDAQ listed, then known as The Meet Group and traded under the ticker M-E-E-T

The thing that most stood out about Terry was his loyalty. If ever there was a buy-and-hold investor, he was the one. He made a bet on people, and so long as those people were still in it, so was he.?

Running a venture-backed company, I relied on Terry’s loyalty again and again. He had the same number of shares as the Silicon Valley VCs who were also on the Board, and he made it difficult, for one of them in particular, to pick on me.

Terry would occasionally come to some Board meetings in CA, but more often than not, he would phone them in. When things were getting heated, Terry would speak up, in that slow, gravelly voice of his, “now listen here … you’re not listening to Geoff,” and he’d say something to get to the heart of the matter.?

If a startup is a car, the VC mentality can be to run the car at a cliff at 100mph, and hope you have built a rocketship on the way down. Terry and I had a more incremental approach. After all, Terry loved cars. He would spend years rebuilding them, why destroy a perfectly good one??

Without his support, the company not only would not have happened, I may have been kicked out of it, or it would never have gone public.?

Terry support was always unconditional. I could rely on him. At times he felt like a benefactor, other times a mentor, and always a friend.?

That company he helped to start now employs many hundreds of people, people who earn good livings, own homes, and raise families, the products of that company now reach millions of people. That’s part of his enduring legacy.

Terry never bothered with financial results. He always wanted to know what we were building …?Was it novel? Was it interesting? Who would use it? Would it make the world a little bit better?

Terry was a tinkerer. One time in his garage he showed me the holes he was drilling in himself, testing a medical device he was building to make it easier to deliver medication underneath fingernails and toenails.?

Terry challenged me to build novel things. He was a dreamer. He made unusual bets, and he stuck with them.?He lived an original life, and he invited originality in return. Play & possibility flowed in his veins.?

A creator of futures, Terry created mine.