On Wednesday night my good friend Oliver Schmelzle passed away from a rare blood infection. He was only admitted to hospital earlier this week, and to my knowledge was perfectly healthy before this, so this was very sudden. Oliver was only 38 years old, and leaves behind his wife Lacey and young son Ryder.
Oliver was an uncommon combination of intelligence and genuine niceness. Once every month or two he and I might meet to chat about business, technology, where we grew up (Germany in Oliver’s case), and all manner of interesting stuff. Normally Oliver would suggest meeting for coffee, I’d suggest meeting for beers, and we’d end up going for beers.
Oliver would patiently listen as I bounced my various harebrained ideas off him, and would always give me valuable and insightful feedback. He would often surprise me with his deep understanding of both business and technology.
My wife Janie would sometimes come out with us. At one point Janie was managing a small team of programmers, but her real aspiration was to become a Product Manager, which was Oliver’s role at that time. Oliver was more than happy to answer her questions and provide advice.
In recent weeks I had seen more of Oliver than usual. He had started working at a new company, Vast, and recognized that my company might be able to help them. I had a meeting there on Wednesday, and had hoped to see Oliver there, but his colleagues said he was out sick.
Obviously nobody realized how serious it was at that time, his colleagues expected him to be back in the office in a day or two. We joked that once he got back we would tell Oliver that we’d given up on online advertising and decided to use billboards instead, knowing that he would think this was idiotic. Of course being the nice guy that he is, Oliver wouldn’t have said so, he would have listened to our plan and politely tried to persuade us not to do it.
I will sincerely miss my conversations with Oliver, and the opportunity to work with him. Janie’s and my deepest sympathies are with Lacey and Ryder.
Oliver’s remembrance services will be on October 21st at 5pm at the Weed-Corley-Fish Funeral Home, Lamar location, and at 11am on October 22nd at Tarrytown United Methodist Church.
update: Oliver’s obituary in the Statesman newspaper is now available here.
update 2: Some other friends and colleagues have written about their memories of Oliver, read them here and here.
