Life is sometimes truly unfair... Chris Hipp, passed away yesterday, and the world is a poorer place for it.
There's a character on a TV beer ad called "The most interesting man in the world". Hipp was the real life incarnation of that invented person.
He was one of those extraordinary people whose actual life was far more interesting than anything one could make up: He started out as a semi-pro cyclist in Texas, competing against the likes of Lance Armstrong, and started an SGI reseller in Dallas just when 3D graphics and DCC started to make a real impact in the market. He then founded RocketLogic (later RLX systems) and, in the process, invented Blade Servers and created an entire market, for which he never got anything close to real credit.
Later, he moved west to California, and co-founded Orion Multisystems (where we worked together), a company that built deskside supercomputers, and helped usher in the age of low power supercomputing, and green computing in general. At the time of his passing he was working for DWave who build quantum computers, and along the way, he championed, nurtured and helped a number of companies to get funding, and develop partnerships. He was a visionary who was always happiest at the bleeding edge, and made it his mission to ensure that technology, big or small, had a fighting chance to make an impact, and to change the way people think.
His incessant fascination with other people, and the things they were doing, compelled him to go out of his way to make friends with interesting and creative people, in many fields. Whenever I was with him, at a trade show or an event, it seemed like he knew almost everybody of importance in both the High Performance Computing and the Cycling world, and they knew him too (there are *many* cool and off-color stories). At a show like SC, it would take him 2 days to walk the floor, just because of bumping into people he knew. I think I only ever managed to introduce him to a handful of people he didn't already know, or hadn't already met.
Through it all, one had the sense that even though he had achieved so much, he wasn't close to being finished helping to change the world.
He was infinitely curious, and technologically was attracted to the innovative, the meaningful and the cool. He deeply loved his companera, Lorraine, his cats, cycling, technology and the Chipotle burritos at Maria Elenas in Alviso. He was also one of the few people I called a friend.
I'm having a hard time dealing with the fact that a voice that was so full of life is now silent. Damn.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)