Dec 11, 2007

Farewell to an Old Warrior

I was saddened to hear of the passing of Stan Wright today.

Stan The Man was the founder and lead pony of PinPoint Communications, which is where I knew him from. I think it was back in about 1998 or so that we were intro'd -- the company I was involved with at the time has been engaged by him to do some coding work, I think.

Stan didn't look the part of your typical software startup entrepreneur -- he was twice the age of his fellow tenants at the RPI Incubator; a gruff old-school kind of guy amongst the diploma - carrying fresh faces.

But his baby, PinPoint, is what the game is all about--a narrow, vertical niche player that offered a very specific set of solutions in a very focused field. In this case, it was "grassroots lobbying" software; or that was the company tagline at least. He ran it as basically a one-man band, fighting the good fight trying to keep it afloat on a day-to-day basis.

My favorite remembrance of Stan was when I tossed him what I thought was a curve ball during an informal conversation. It was at a techConnex mixer at Brown's Brewing Companyy, circa 2000. I asked him whether he felt any guilt over the deployment of his software, which I opined "was just basically flooding the in-boxes of Congressman with junk mail." But he was ready for me on this one...

Stan's reply was simple: "Hell, these are the idiots that let our mailboxes get filled with unwanted junk mail, I'm just giving them a taste of their own medicine."

Well put, Mr Wright.

Bon Voyage.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Knew Stan from CLL (leukemia) support group meetings; he was the one who kept everyone laughing; will miss him but he's in a better place.