An Honest Remembrance of My Friend and Co-Founder Mani Gandham

Mani (pronounced “money”) was my friend. We were in the trenches together as co-founders over a 9-year span. When his best friend reached out to break the news of his passing last Thursday (June 29th) at 35 in a tragic car accident I felt that it was my duty to share the news with those of you who know him. And for those of you who never got the chance to meet him, I hope this remembrance gives you a glimpse into who he was.

I first met Mani in 2012 at a tech meetup in Santa Monica. He spoke at an auctioneer’s pace and as it happened he had also worked in the digital ad industry. I had a startup itch I wanted to scratch and he listened to my pitch for RiseTogether, a motivation network for unmotivated people. We became fast friends, went to Coachella together and ideated over the product over dinners while we were both employed. We actually had a few competitors in the space and when they fizzled out we knew the market just wasn’t there.

I remember him asking why I didn’t want to start an advertising startup instead since that’s where I had spent the entirety of my post-college career. It was a prescient question as I would go on to start my second ad-tech startup called Instinctive with him in 2014. RiseTogether was a side gig but this was the main event. We would be chatting for hours on end on product and strategy. My roommate at the time got so pissed off that I was doing this from home all day and night that he raged at me to get an office. This was all bootstrapped while our competitors were able to raise millions of dollars and at least one would go on to sell for over a billion. An influential ad industry banker would refuse to put us on his tech landscape chart despite a defunct competitor taking up a slot. Our dream was deferred and denied but we survived through pure grit and determination. We built a multi-million dollar business together despite it all.

Mani seemingly had an opinion on everything and some of them were very well-informed. On technical matters, I deferred to his judgment. Mani’s published technical content that’s been read by millions of people. He seemed to have an answer for everything. On Quora, he’s written over 906 answers that were viewed over 3.5 million times. On Stack Overflow, his 92 answers have reached 1.4 million people. He’s racked up close to 25,000 karma on HackerNews, which is apparently a lot. Point being, if there were some technical nerd influencer Olympics, he would most certainly be a contender.

His key accomplishment at Instinctive was to single-handedly build, from scratch, a highly cost-efficient ad tech stack that served high-end bespoke sponsored articles to millions of people each month. He was also highly protective of his domain and so despite my pleas to hire more help, in the end, the tech was all him while I scaled up sales and operational roles. He would also drive me crazy with his obsession for the latest shiny thing in tech. I lost track of how many database migrations we made over the years. We were on ScyllaDB (where Instinctive is a case study), then AeroSpike and then MemSQL (where Mani was named their August 2019 Community Star). We were on the bleeding edge and we bled.

We had grown distant over time. I moved to NYC in 2015 to court the big advertiser accounts while he stayed behind in LA. Our friendship was probably strongest when we weren’t bound to each other for economic survival. It was tense at times but we always found a way through. We parted ways professionally in the middle of the pandemic after an acquisition and he went on to work on his own high-yield fund while I ended up building my own blockchain protocols. While we were no longer in each other’s daily orbits, he seemed to be really enjoying his life in his last days. The recent BlackBerry movie had spurred our last conversation, which was reminiscing about the internal scandal we had to deal with after a typo on one of our ads for BlackBerry turned into a joke on Jimmy Fallon’s late night show.

Mani pulled no punches and had snark on tap. He also had a boundless energy about him that was at times awe-inspiring or annoying. I lost count of the times he’s asked me, “What’s next?”. He loved steak and seemingly ate like he was on the Atkins diet. He loved watching Shark Tank and I enjoyed needling his unwavering defense of Mr. Wonderful. He wasn’t your stereotypical programmer who was hiding behind 3 screens. He was gregarious. He was a playful troublemaker. Our chance meeting over a decade ago changed the trajectory of my life. Every founder is a gambler. He bet on me when few others did and sometimes when I barely had faith in myself. I’ll miss you dearly, friend.