John Walker, RIP

It was in December, and I can’t tell you the exact year, but I can tell you where I was. I was on Highway 5, driving up from Los Angeles to San Francisco, to a meeting with the rest of the Ricochet team. We had decided that we needed to shut the project down. It had been a noble experiment, we told ourselves, but a failure. We just didn’t have enough members to keep the thing going.

The last thing I did before hitting the road was make a post, entitled “The End of Ricochet” — it might have had a question mark at the end, I can’t quite recall — but by the time I got to the Bay Area a lot of folks had responded — enough to keep the thing going for another few months, enough to help us figure out another way to stay alive.

One member in particular, John Walker, sent us an email. He’d like to know what kind of money we needed, not just to keep going but to grow and flourish. He was a tech entrepreneur, the brilliant founder of Autodesk, a 3D design software company with impact in nearly every global industry. (He tried to explain it to me many times, but all I really understood was that John Walker was a mad genius.) He lived in a chalet in Switzerland — “Like a Bond villain?” I asked on one of our phone calls — and tinkered and invented and wrote and lived exactly like a restless and brilliant polymath.

With a big investment from John, we managed to grow and (not exactly) thrive: we did some necessary work transferring our site to a more stable and extensible content management system, and we came to admire this razor smart, prickly, eccentric thinker with high standards for code and computer engineering and a willingness to explain to smaller brains, like mine, how it was all supposed to work. He even sent me a PDF of his weight loss book — talk about a polymath! — and it worked. (For a time, anyway, but that wasn’t John’s fault….)

If you’re a member of Ricochet, you should know that you have John Walker to thank. And you should also know — and some of you already know this — that John soured a bit (a lot?) on the leadership of this experiment (ahem) and pulled away from it in later years. When you work with people of genius, that kind of thing happens. But it doesn’t diminish our gratitude and respect and awe for this amazing man.

John Walker died on February 2nd, in Neuchatel, Switzerland, following a bad fall down the stairs. He will be buried, we are told, in a pasture a short walk from his house.

In a New Year’s post on the site that he ran, Scanalyst, John wrote: “Let’s celebrate the possibilities of an unbounded future and remember it’s up to us to build the future in which we wish to live. Only the past is written.” John did exactly that with his life, his work, and Ricochet.

From the very start, Ricochet has always been about the members. Those who post often, those who only chime in now and then, those who read and nod along (or don’t nod along) — we’re all part of this experiment in group conversation and debate which has been going along for a decade and more. Today, tonight, send a prayer of gratitude to one of our fellow members, an unforgettable, singular man who kept the lights burning in this place with generosity and wit and passion, who was always a friend in the real sense of the word.