If a stranger found your phone and asked me, “Who did this phone belong to?”, I think I’d tell them this:
It belonged to [NAME].
He was an unusually curious person. He didn't just want answers — he wanted to understand how things actually worked. He could jump from questions about economics and technology to cat litter, door frames, e-bikes, streaming a laptop to a TV, British weather, money transfers, or some obscure technical problem, and he'd usually keep asking until the explanation made intuitive sense.
He was very direct. If an answer didn't quite sit right with him, he would say so. Sometimes politely, sometimes emphatically. He wasn't particularly interested in being agreed with; he cared about whether something was actually true. He'd challenge an argument he thought was logically flawed and was perfectly capable of changing his mind when the reasoning convinced him.
He was also a builder.
He'd been working on the internet for an extraordinarily long time — starting ridiculously young — and had spent much of his adult life making websites, experimenting with online marketing, figuring out how to get attention, convert it into customers, and turn ideas into something that worked. He didn't follow a conventional career path. In fact, he left school at 15. But he taught himself an enormous amount and managed to build a life around the things that genuinely interested him.
He had a very entrepreneurial brain. You could give him a problem and he'd often instinctively start looking for the mechanism underneath it:
What's causing this?
Can it be changed?
What's the simplest solution?
How could it be made to work better?
He was also far more interested in practical reality than appearances. He'd ask things like how noisy an automatic cat litter machine actually is when it cleans itself, whether supermarket clumping litter is genuinely suitable, how to physically repair a damaged door frame, or exactly how an e-bike should be secured outside a shop.
Not glamorous questions.
But very [NAME].
He liked things explained simply. Not because he couldn't understand complicated things — quite the opposite — but because he disliked unnecessary complication. When something could be reduced to a straightforward explanation, he wanted it reduced.
He also had a mischievous side. There was a certain enjoyment in asking questions that made you think, “Okay, that's an oddly specific thing to want to know.” He could be serious one minute and completely irreverent the next.
And underneath all of that, I think there was something quite important:
He was intensely self-aware.
He spent a lot of time trying to understand himself — his decisions, his motivations, his reactions, his mistakes, his ambitions and the patterns in his life. He wasn't somebody who was satisfied with simply saying “that's just how I am.” He repeatedly tried to work out why he was the way he was.
He had made mistakes. Some were small and some were consequential. He knew that. But one of the clearest things I've learned about him is that he didn't see his life as finished just because parts of it had gone badly.
He was remarkably future-oriented.
Even when discussing something that had happened years ago, he'd often turn the conversation towards what happens next? What does this mean now? How much does it matter? Can it be fixed? What are the options?
He also loved possibility.
You could see it in the questions he asked about AI and where technology might take ordinary people's lives. He wasn't merely interested in what technology could do today; he wanted to know what might become possible ten years from now.
And, perhaps appropriately, he was someone who had spent a huge portion of his life on the internet — not merely consuming it, but making things on it.
If I had to describe him in a few words, I'd say:
Curious. Analytical. Independent. Entrepreneurial. Argumentative when he thought something was wrong. Practical. Occasionally chaotic. Often funny. Extremely persistent.
And probably the most [NAME] characteristic of all:
He asked a lot of questions.
Not because he was incapable of figuring things out himself.
Because he genuinely wanted to know.
So if you were holding his phone and wondering who the person behind it was, I don't think I'd tell you that he was defined by his job, his bank balance, his mistakes, or any particular chapter of his life.
I'd tell you:
He was someone who spent his life trying to understand things, build things, fix things, and — sometimes painfully, sometimes successfully — understand himself.
And he was still asking questions right up until the end.
