Remembering Brent Schlender

My friend, Brent Schlender, died on October 10. I did not want to let him pass to the other side without acknowledging his life and our friendship.

I knew Brent from when he first moved to Silicon Valley in 1986 as a tech reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I was a tech-industry pundit at the time, writing a newsletter and holding a conference, so he reached out to me. We bonded as fellow travelers in the journalism business. Brent had a particular ability to connect with and hold friendships with important people in the personal computer industry, and we ended up discussing endlessly the character of tech entrepreneurs.

He changed jobs to write for Fortune magazine in 1989. I changed careers to become a venture capital investor in 1996. When that happened, Brent introduced me to the editors of Fortune magazine, where I ended up writing a column for 7 years. He spent some time in Japan on behalf of Fortune; my oldest daughter stayed with him in Tokyo, where he and his wife, Lorna, were gracious hosts, and Nathalie developed a love for Japan. My son spent time at Brent & Lorna’s house during his nomadic travels, and Brent became a resource for him during his difficult teenage years.

In other words, Brent’s and my lives were intertwined. He and Lorna bought a lot in Santa Fe and planned to build a house and move there; I already owned a place in Santa Fe (and moved here since then) and was enthusiastic to contemplate living in the same town with Brent & Lorna, again. But… life intervened.

Brent and Lorna decided to drive from Santa Fe to Lorna’s hometown of Managua, Nicaragua. Along the way, Brent contracted meningitis and was airlifted (thanks to Fortune) back to San Francisco and treated at Stanford Hospital. After loads of steroids and recovering from meningitis, he lost his hearing totally in one ear and mostly in the other. It’s very difficult to be a reporter when you can’t hear, so he and Lorna ended up moving to Sebastopol, California, and he eventually retired from the job. He took that opportunity to write the best book ever about Steve Jobs, called Becoming Steve Jobs. He cowrote the book with Rick Tetzeli, who was our editor at Fortune back in the day, but the source material was hundreds of hours of interviews he had taped with Jobs before he died.

It is Brent’s legacy that he was able to establish friendships with important executives in the computer industry, in particular with both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It was that ability that enabled him to persuade the two icons to be photographed together for Fortune at Steve’s house in 1991. Brent visited Steve in the Stanford Hospital and Steve visited Brent in the same hospital. To be able to report on friends and stay friends is a singular skill.

I can only think of Brent as a Kansan. He was born and bred Kansas, went to University of Kansas, and went straight into journalism at the Wall Street Journal. If being a Kansan means being humble, straightforward, happy, that’s what I mean about Brent. One of his friends, David Stipp, tells this story about Brent: “A few years ago, he wrote to me about wildfires that for a while had threatened to reach Sebastopol: “Sunday night, there were mighty gales of hot air from the east that littered our property with pine needles and blowing ash and debris from the fires, including a singed, full page from a Gary Larson ‘Far Side’ coffee table book. I think I’m going to frame it.” What really deserves framing here, though, is a picture of Brent in his backyard getting all tickled about a bizarre visitation from Gary Larson while an apocalyptic wildfire was raging in the background.”

I miss Brent and will keep missing him.