Martin McCarthy's Eulogy for Ken Brill
Eulogy for Ken Brill
St. Albans Episcopal Church Cape Elizabeth, Maine
August 17, 2013
I loved Ken Brill.
It took me 50 years of my life to get ready to meet this man, but I loved him. And in the last 5 years he’s been such an influence and such an inspiration to me, like few in my lifetime.
We shared Harvard Business School, though he was 10 years ahead of me.. as he was 10 years ahead in pretty much everything, for me and most others.
Howard Stephensen, one of the professors there at Harvard, defined entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”, and Ken was an entrepreneur. Ken was an inventor, Ken was an inveterate tinkerer, Ken loved new ideas, he loved to debate. And he thought it was a contact sport.
But Ken was more than just an entrepreneur, Ken was a founder. Ken created, Ken was the originator, Ken came up with ideas, processes, means of associations and ways of understanding that few people can provide.
His reputation preceded him, and I remember being more than a little concerned about meeting Ken. I had heard him speak and attended his conferences, I knew of him for years, but it took a little bit to get ready to meet Ken, because I needed to prove that I was worthy to take forward what he had devoted so much of his life to creating, in the form of his ideas and his Institute. Thank god I was fortunate to at least get the chance to do so.
I think in ways, in the last 5 years, I’ve been doing what I’m doing today, trying to explain Ken to the world. To help others understand, how focused, how seminal, how impactful this man was in his chosen field.
I have the good fortune to live in upstate New York on the weekends, near the sacred grounds of Woodstock, which just commemorated its 44th anniversary a few days ago. Ken Brill was the “Woodstock of the Data Center industry”. There were festivals that had been before and many that have come since, but Ken—like the Woodstock Music festival— was the moment, marked the moment….and this moment went on for years.
People would mark themselves in relationship to Ken. “Were you there in the beginning?” “Were you with Ken when he founded Uptime?” “How and how long did you know Ken?” In recent years I got to travel the world with Ken, in China, in Singapore, in Europe, in Oslo, in Paris, many places, and got to meet many people, and everywhere I went, people wanted to meet Ken Brill. They wanted to know this man, one who had the vision to make something solid and worthwhile out of nothing. Ken is rightfully known now as the “Father of the Data Center industry”. Who was this man, who in his own way, as much as Woodstock, really captured and embodied the zeitgeist of the time, and who really spawned a generation that followed…that’s what Ken did.
He’s an anarchist. He’s a revolutionary. He’s a counterculture figure of great impact and great reknown. He was a contrarian. He has lasted, and he will endure. His impact is profound.
Sometimes Ken would forget the broader context. He would dive in, but then get lost in the details, the technical specifics. He could go down and dive so deep, like those pearl divers, then come up for air, but he’d stay down for hours. I would try to bring him back up and remind him that “You are (and I will edit this adjective for this church audience) “freaking” Ken Brill. Remember that. Ken, come back to the top.”
He was blunt and direct.
Compelling, but not so charming.
Devoted, and undeterred.
Deeply caring, but intellectually, totally unsentimental.
But his passion, his energy, his drive, his will, his appetite were inspiring.
He was brilliant, but bristly.
And I say again now what I said to him many times when we were working through the opportunity for me to move forward with him with the acquisition of his beloved Uptime Institute.
“Drop the Boulder…Seize the Balloon”
Seize the balloon. Let’s all take a balloon for Ken.
Copyright 2013, By Martin McCarthy. Reproduced here with permission.
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