Diaspora Co-Founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy Passes Away At 21

"We shall have to work faster."

http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda

Even if it was suicide, this too we will overcome.

Things like this often give me pause for thought. Often this community, and indeed myself, drive myself to attain better results, and generally push towards a wealthy career, so often we can forget what is truly important.

I'm a religious person, so often this translates to worrying about how I'm prepared should I also meet an early grave, but its important that in times like this that we also see the importance of others in our lives, our family, relationships etc.

Easy to forget that the thing we work so hard for can be wiped away in a split second.

My deepest sympathies to all involved.

This is not part of the american cultural narrative and thus will be harder to accept even to your own psyche.

Its important to understand how the difference between your own thinking and society's thinking can and will affect your own happiness (usually in a negative way). Its not something many people think about but has very real consequences.

It doesn't take a special person, so much as it's simply the case that no matter who you are, your startup is likely to fail.

When I was much younger and starting my first (fundably doomed) startup, one of my cofounders liked to say, "yeah, most businesses fail, but those statistics include companies trying to sell soft drinks to Eskimos and combination Chinese food/pizza restaurants". Then we'd all chuckle, knowing that the statistics most certainly didn't capture dynamic new technology firms like ours.

No. Most companies fail. Look at the list of dead YC companies. Those were screened by a team that has specialized in doing nothing but screening founding teams and then attempting to give them every advantage their considerable and growing infrastructure and connections can give them. And they still fail.

Because that is what startups do. They fail.

The best, most talented, most experienced founders in the world would presumably be among the first to tell you that you can't read anything about your self from the simple fact that your company failed. Learn what you can, but don't ever let it grind on you.

(Some people just shouldn't be in this game, for whatever it's worth, like Matt Damon said about the no-limit players in Rounders; not because they can't, but because it's not healthy for them.)

1. If at first you don't succeed, redefine success.

2. Success is measured in many ways, and one of those ways is dollars. There are many different ways to get dollars.

3. Failure leads to success.

4. Diaspora got GREAT and HIGHLY SUPPORTIVE press about 2 months ago from Free Software Magazine.

5. Diaspora had substantial cash flow shortly after launching the foundation. In fact they got SO MUCH MONEY that PayPal froze their account, probably because they thought it was fraud (fraud detection is REALLY hard and false positives are cheaper than false negatives...this is IMHO the most likely interpretation).

On the contrary, Ilya was in a GREAT position. LOTS of people would have given their left testicle to be him. Now, if he couldn't handle the stress, or he had one too many shots of Vodka, that is tragic, but don't try to bring Diaspora down with him. The facts are not on your side.

tl;dr It is WAAAAY too early to be declaring Diaspora a failure.