Gary Doan represented the best of any tech founder I’ve had the privilege of working with — and I’ve worked with scores and scores of  them over my three-decade+ career. Sadly, we lost Gary last week, and I feel like I’ve lost one of my best friends.

Even though I hadn’t seen him in a year or more, I had such a bond with him. We frequently chatted online… about tech, about local news, about national events. So learning of his passing was a shock to me. No – not our Gary!

But I have many great memories and stories. I wrote a lengthy post about him on LinkedIn today. In it, I referred to a full scan of a really great cover story that appeared in our local Minnesota Business magazine. Here it is as a PDF:

GaryDoan-MNBusinessArticle-2004

(That’s the cover you see at right.) Gary had just launched his third tech startup at that point. He pulled me into that startup soon after this story, and it was an amazing experience.

Please go read that full article above, and the LinkedIn post. And do comment there on LinkedIn if you knew Gary. He was an inspiration to many!