Rajeev Motwani: In Memoriam
Posted by Prat Moghe on Mon, Jun 08, 2009
Over this past weekend, I received a shocking news. Rajeev Motwani passed away in a senseless accident at his house. At first it was hard to even believe this could be true until I talked to a few friends. It is still hard to accept.
I was first introduced to Rajeev through interesting circumstances. A few years back, a security architect at a financial services company found the Mantra data mining technology interesting enough that he put me in touch with Rajeev. Rajeev was a Professor at Stanford, and known to be a leading expert in CS theory and algorithms with interest in data mining and privacy. As soon as we had a first conversation we clicked right away. We found many other common connections. My wife knew of Rajeev as “Mots” from her Berkeley days.
Rajeev soon became an advisor to Tizor. Rajeev was very much the active advisor – he worked hard without expecting a return. Over the years, we met pretty much every time I visited the bay area. We had our favorite haunts. One of them was University Café in Palo Alto. Once as I took my Starbucks there, Rajeev forced me to dump it down the trash before we could get down to our discussions. At another meeting, Rajeev wanted to find out how the Google stock was doing – they had just gone public, but he was too busy to track it. Rajeev was a formative influence on the Google founders and technology, particularly Sergey Brin (http://too.blogspot.com/2009/06/remembering-rajeev.html).
Rajeev was very supportive through all the key events at Tizor. His rolodex was phenomenal as was his effort. He was excited about the Netezza acquisition of Tizor and was looking forward to being a part of the future technology inventions and possibilities. Last year, when my wife and I founded a startup around mobile analytics, Rajeev was the first stop for us, and again he readily rolled up his sleeves to become actively involved.
As I analyze why I enjoyed interactions with Rajeev, I realize he was a complete person. Unlike CS theory purists, he was comfortable with non-optimality. This combined with his rigor was an unbeatable match. Unlike many other professors, Rajeev was equally comfortable in technology and business. He had an astute nose for common sense and what works. (I would often suggest to Rajeev to jump full-time into entrepreneurship, and he would just nod.) Above all, he had strong integrity and ethics and a sense of giving. He represented the best in us. I will miss him dearly.