I didn't choose Matt; he came as part of a package. His biological father died of cancer when he was six months old. Matt was four when Ellen and I got married.
I didn't choose Matt; he came as part of a package. His biological father died of cancer when he was six months old. Matt was four when Ellen and I got married.
Living with him as he was growing up was never easy. He was impulsive, wired with a crazy, boundless energy. At four, he learned to ride a bike and immediately crashed into the same curb two Saturdays straight, losing one front tooth the first week and the other the next. Ellen cried both times. I bought him a helmet.
First grade broke him. He was so miserable he talked about killing himself. We got him to a specialist, learned he had ADHD, started Ritalin, and bought him a laptop and printer. What we didn't know then but science later proved is that early treatment with Ritalin can actually reshape the brain's pathways. By high school, he had outgrown both the medication and most of the symptoms.
After three years together, we bought a cabin in Tahoe and tore our Los Altos Hills house apart in a giant DIY remodel. Those decisions gave Matt two great gifts: skiing, which he loved instantly, and life in a construction zone, which he mostly tolerated. He joined the Alpine Meadows ski team and, more than once, we lost track of him on the mountain only to learn he'd taken another trip to the hospital in Truckee.
Around age nine, I took Matt and his best friend, Chris, to the computer parts store and we built their first PCs. That single afternoon lit a fuse in both of them. Matt and I crawled through the house crawlspace way too many times running network cable—first Thinnet, then Cat 3 when the internet finally arrived. In the early days, he and Chris were glued to AOL and Q-Link, two little nerds building peer-to-peer worlds before the real one showed up.
Ellen still laughs about the endless Tahoe drives filled with Matt and me geeking out over DNS, TCP/IP, IRC, and every acronym in a language she didn't understand. When the home-built machines couldn't keep up, we bought him a serious computer. I foolishly thought the wild experimentation was over, but I didn't understand his nerd brain. Getting a clean machine running perfectly was just the starting line. He'd wipe the drive and install the latest operating system—OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD—over and over. It drove me crazy. To me, a computer was a tool. To Matt, it was a playground he needed to take apart and rebuild to truly know it.
One day he pitched me a business idea: "Let's create a shell account service." I agreed, but I didn't realize at the time that hackers used shell accounts as launchpads for attacks. We launched our little business and it exploded. We thought we'd struck gold, until we discovered every single account was paid for with stolen credit cards. We shut it down fast enough to limit the damage, but it was one hell of a life lesson.
Our neighbor ran Whistle Communications, pioneers in simple internet appliances. Matt interned there, then landed a job at an internet gaming company while still in high school. Right after graduation, he went to work making serious money. That brought the sports car, the purple hair, and the car crash after he forgot to pay the insurance. I helped him hire an attorney and navigate the trouble. It was another difficult chapter.
College never interested him—not even a little. That broke Ellen's heart. Years later, he joined Netflix's ill-fated Qwikster experiment. When it shut down, the generous severance package gave him the rare gift of time—time he used to find his perfect professional home at Nextdoor.
In his early twenties, he asked to use his college savings toward buying a house then purchased the house on Crompton Road. He filled it with an eclectic group of renters, then after he and Annette got married, Annette, Matt, and I designed a brand new house together. They lived with us during construction. Matt and I built a lot of the structural and finish details together. When it was finished, they moved in, had Luca, then Adele, bought the Tahoe cabin with Pat and Alex, and for a long while, everything felt perfect.