When My Cofounder Died, It Showed Me How to Run My Company He left me the book 'Life Is Short,' and its lessons became a guiding principle for everything I do.

In the early days of my first startup, PlanGrid, our cofounder Antoine Hersen — who was only 29 at the time — died of cancer. We lived and worked from a house in Sunnyvale together, and he programmed until his last days.