He was brutally fair. He never yelled, but he also never smiled until the clock hit 5:01 PM. He had a habit of reading your email drafts over your shoulder. "Cut the fluff," he would say, pointing at a sentence. "We aren't poets; we are shippers. Get the product out the door."
The defining moment came in October 2012. Hurricane Sandy was barreling up the coast, and the office was buzzing about shutting down. Everyone was refreshing weather websites on their bulky Dell monitors. D called a meeting. He looked at the radar, looked at our deadline for a client presentation, and said, "The internet doesn't get wet." my boss 2012
He eventually left the company in 2015 to start his own consultancy. I heard he finally bought a laptop. But in my memory, he is frozen in 2012: standing by the whiteboard, marker in hand, BlackBerry buzzing, trying to draw a straight line through a very crooked world. He wasn't a friend. He wasn't a villain. He was the boss the 2012 economy demanded—tough, analog, and unflinchingly present. He was brutally fair