I remember landing at SJC airport during one of the fund raising rounds, and hitting up Sand Hill with Mike and some VC types.

Mike actually had a printed out PowerPoint deck with our executive summary and overview. He was tearing out the slides/pages he didn’t like, physically — I don’t even think we had laptops yet.

I really appreciated his improvisational confidence, and unorthodox approach. Not that I knew what was/was not orthodox at the time, I was 20 years old or something, so I hadn’t seen anything like that before.

But a bar was set so high with Mike, as a CEO, boss, friend, person, that since then if I find half of that in anyone I deal with professionally, I’m extremely happy.

— Edward Bender