HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain sent final email before sudden death
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It’s a sad reminder of how vulnerable those who care deeply about their work can be in the face of toxic or unjust environments. Passion and commitment, when met with indifference or hostility, can push anyone to a breaking point.
Well, it started with an interpersonal workplace conflict, but ended up with him being forced to retire from his professorship and the entrepreneurial mentoring program he saw as his mission.
People are jumping to conclusions about who the aggrieved party is because they have a vague connection to the guy who made HowStuffWorks and zero connection to the counterparty. Especially on HN, people would rather believe that "the system is rigged against the brilliant individual" rather than "the individual can often be the problem".
Just as often as upper management is corrupt, a single individual who had NO PRIOR EVIDENCE OF NEGATIVE INTERACTION WITH ANYONE goes absolutely apeshit and attempts to destroy your life.
My mother is a well respected teacher. After about 4 years of working in a new school, one of the other teachers in her department seemingly got "triggered" and went utterly insane. He started fabricating ethics complaints, lying to administrators, and even went so far as to retain a lawyer to sue the school district to have her removed for his completely made up allegations. I read the complaint and I cannot believe a lawyer was willing to be paid to participate. It was pages of insane rantings, like manifesto level, full of misspellings and mistakes and made up entirely of outright lies. The internal investigation was terrifying, because it starts as "He said/She said". Luckily he was crazy enough to fill his allegations with things that were demonstrably disprovable with documentation, but without that, the school absolutely would have just let my mother go instead of fight it.
There was no "cause", no change in department policy that favored my mother over him, no change in pecking order, nothing. He just one day decided to go to war with her. He completely lost his connection to reality. Yet to his students, he continued to teach normally, and nothing seemed off.
We have no facts. We have no evidence. We likely never will. We should reserve judgement.
Slightly off topic question, but is this Silicon-Randian projection really particularly widespread on HN by and large or only for specific subset of topics?
For example, he frequently filed ethics complaints against other faculty after minor disagreements... putting their careers at risk over trivial matters.
He may have been well like by the internet but he was not well liked at the school, and the relative silence by faculty and students is pretty telling.
Also, consider Brain made a quarter of 1 Billion dollars with the sale of his company. The man didn't have to work, it was his choice to work. I think this contributes even more to the feeling that work is your identity.
Incorrect. The company burned through venture capital for three years, then laid off 50% of workers and was sold in 2002 to vulture capital for ~$1MM with no cash trading hands, only a promissory note [1] to the previous underwater investors. No liquidity to founders.
The 2002 purchaser, Convex Group, scaled the company, took the company public via reverse IPO and sold it five years later to Discovery TV for $250MM. Seven years later, Discovery took a 82% loss, selling the company for $45MM.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240717220914/https://genesis-c...
> Marshall was a cornerstone of entrepreneurship at NC State, and a very key person who dedicated himself and was a real entrepreneur, and really dedicated himself to the students ... he, through and through, down to the bone, had the love and desire to help students ... Brian was born in Santa Monica, California, and was heavily influenced as a child by his father's work designing components for NASA's lunar lander and his later development of Atlanta's MARTA system.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article296186159....
> “A lot of people I would tell about my business, and they said, ‘Oh, it’s a cool idea,’” said Kevin Barry, who founded the startup FilterEasy as an NC State undergraduate. “But Marshall is one of the people who would dive in and ask you every question and every problem and help you work towards solutions.”
Obituary: https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/cary-nc/marshall-...
150 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42251656
I don't understand what would make them use another word like that? Is "suicide" bad for SEO or something?
https://www.presscouncil.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/S...
> The week before Thanksgiving, Marshall Brain sent a final email to his colleagues at North Carolina State University. "I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the university," wrote the founder of HowStuffWorks.com and director of NC State's Engineering Entrepreneurs Program. Hours later, campus police found that Brain had died by suicide.
The headline is admittedly a bit weird.
Youtube for example will outright demonetize your video if you mention suicide. That's their official policy as stated https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802245?hl=en&ref_... . It's stupid as fuck.
As the GameGrumps team (very progressive people) mockingly stated: "It's so easy to solve the problem when we can't talk about it"
It is usually taken as a given that TikTok will just not surface your content if you say suicide, but I'm not active on tiktok and have no source.
Like all these absurd restrictions on content, it is not driven by liberals, or policy, or law. It is entirely driven by the fact that Coke does not want to pay for the ad space next a video talking about a difficult subject.
It's the free market baby.
When she tried to curb this, she received severe pressure both inside and outside the university to back down. A bad press piece was written about her from a respected news source. Cars would appear and wait outside her house at night.
The pressure must have been immense, and I'm glad she didn't end up like Marshall.
Sometimes all you can do is walk away from a career you've built. Whoever's toe you've stepped on, it's bigger than you.
They can't even pretend to feel bad (not that it makes it any better)?
It is depressing that good, sensitive, ethical people are deeply affected by the shitty things they see while those who actually do those shitty things just carry on...
I'll remember Marshall for the "How Stuff Works" books. Thank you for devoting your live to education.