The Dawn of Meaning

It started with a worried call from my mom two weeks ago. Dad, 94, had fallen while on a walk near their house in G?ttingen, Germany, and was now in the hospital with a cracked skull and concussion. I flew over that day.

The next week was a blur of jet lag and hospital visits. Should we bring him home? What were the rehab options? But as the days passed and dad grew weaker, the discussion narrowed.

We wait until the end of life to find meaning. Between hospital visits I looked through photo albums, diaries, and letters he had written. He led an extraordinary life but focused on the ego-free fundamentals: work, family, no spotlight. He brightened every room he entered, but not because he wanted to be the center of attention. As a host, he made sure everyone’s glass was filled.

Robert Otto Pohl was born in 1929 as the son of a renowned physics professor at the University of G?ttingen. He watched as his father worked and associated with all the big names of that generation: Einstein, Planck, Franck, Heisenberg, Born, and so on. As a physicist himself, his father’s success was an inspiration but also created unwanted expectation. As soon as dad received his PhD he moved to the United States and accepted a position at Cornell, which was in the middle of a hiring boom driven by the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the first satellite, and the resulting fear that the Soviets were winning in space.

As soon as he could, he put his dresser drawers (easier than packing!) on the back seat of the Buick Roadmaster he had purchased for $300 and set off on a cross-country trip to discover his new homeland. The photos and letters to his parents from that trip capture the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a 29-year-old discovering the world, from the Central Plains to New Mexico and up to the Pacific Northwest.

He met and married my mom, who had come to Cornell for her chemistry PhD. They bought an old farmhouse on an acre of land outside town. They had three kids, of which I was the youngest. He took the US citizenship and became a tenured, endowed Ivy-League professor who won some of his field’s most prestigious awards. Dad worked hard, often coming home from the lab late for dinner and then going back to his desk afterwards. He would have worked for free, because to him it wasn’t work. He loved his lab in the basement of Clark Hall, setting up experiments that he described as asking the universe questions, and then monitoring the oscilloscopes to decode the answer.

Work may have dominated his schedule, but there was never a question to the north star of his compass. He was devoted to his wife and kids. Vacations were for family trips and visits back to his parents in Germany. He taught me everything I needed to know, not through what he said but by the example he set. Then, as age set in, my parents moved back to Germany and my father’s childhood home, a house his father had built in 1939 as a hedge against the brewing storm. The bomb shelter in the basement is still intact.

I closed the photo albums and wondered, what does it all mean? We all have dreams as we hold our babies in our arms. To be a parent is to be proactively hopeful even as we tamp down worst-case-scenario fears. But meaning? It tempts fate to do any of that until it’s time to sum it all up at the end.

Generations rise and fade through history like a stadium wave. We stand briefly, arms outstretched, then sit down again, and trust the process will continue.

It struck me that this is one of the reasons I love working with startups. It is one of the rare opportunities in life where we can define importance into something right at the start. In fact, the more effectively we describe, capture, and exalt the way in which a fledgling enterprise can bend the arc of history, the more likely it is to succeed at doing exactly that.

In life we constantly ask Why, but struggle to respond. In corporations, on the other hand, Why gets to be the first question we answer. You will this entity into existence and are immediately free to define its desired legacy.

As we stand in that stadium, startups are beautiful helium balloons we can inscribe with our dreams and release to rise into the blue sky.

Back at the hospital, I watched for the brief moments when dad opened his eyes, eyes that had witnessed enough Nazi fascism in childhood to inculcate a lifelong aversion of government overreach, of dictatorial pomp, and of cheap sloganeering. To him, even organized religion was too much abdication to arbitrary power. He was an old school thinker in an age of quickening technology. A descendant of astronomer Johannes Kepler, he was born at the dawn of commercial airplane travel and spent his later years struggling with email and his smartphone.

And then last Friday he finally succumbed. All I had to hold on to as we walked out of the hospital was the bag containing the items he had on him when he fell: wallet, keys, glasses, wedding ring.

It’s up to me now, whatever it is. To define why I’m here, and what I’ll pass to my children. This is why I love—why I find refuge in—working with startups and ambitious founders. We can define a clear reason for being. The more we crisply define goals and motivations, the further that balloon can soar.

Together, we can shake our fists into the hurricane, and define the battle on our own terms.