Blog of Mr. Tweet

Since Friday, most of the major tech blogs have been reporting the passing of Rajeev Motwani, who was a Stanford CS professor as well as adviser to many of the most prominent Silicon Valley startups, including Google. He was also the co-authors of several academic papers that would eventually form the basis of Google Page rank.

This is an tremendously sad incident for the tech community, but it struck us here on a personal level as well, because Rajeev has always been a great help to us.

We first met Rajeev last year after an introduction by Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital. He gave us very candid but absolutely spot on advice about what we were doing wrong. One day after that, we changed our entire product direction. It took us a couple more iterations before we created MrTweet, but we always kept his advice close to our hearts.

Earlier in the year, we touched base with him again, and he introduced us to a string of great people, most of whom we are very much still in touch with.

We were about to catch up with him again, but before we could do so, we received this piece of very sad news. Sober reminder that we should never procrastinate on catching up.

Stories like ours are repeated all over the web, with many entrepreneurs and investors lamenting the loss, and remembering how he has helped them. Here are 2 from Segrey Brin and Om Malik. 

For those of you who knew him, Stanford will be holding a public memorial service. We will post it again when we know details of when it is happening.