Matt Bencke: Goodbye to a Friend

Early this year, Intel Capital was pleased to announce its investment in MightyAI. The startup, co-founded by Matt Bencke, takes an innovative approach to training artificial intelligence systems: By using a global network of human experts to solve problems and answer surveys, MightyAI teaches computers how people think.

In August, just seven months after that happy announcement, Matt shared a far more somber one. During what he thought was a simple doctor's visit to check out symptoms of fatigue and nausea, Matt learned he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

"I gotta be honest, my prognosis isn't great," he wrote in a widely shared post on Wired.

Matt, a Seattle resident and alumnus of Harvard and Microsoft, died Wednesday at just 45. He leaves behind a wife and two young daughters.

Matt made sure the company he and CTO Daryn Nakhuda launched in 2014 would be in good hands after his death. Before informing his staff about the diagnosis (via a hospital-bed teleconference), Matt arranged for Nakhuda to carry on as MightyAI's new CEO. "Matt was a visionary leader," Nakhuda said Thursday in a blog post. "He was Coach Taylor from 'Friday Night Lights,' with a gift for rallying the team around a shared mission."

We couldn't agree more. While Matt and Daryn's vision for MightyAI will live on through the company's team of 50-plus and customers that include leading auto manufacturers, the world is a poorer place today without his technical brilliance and entrepreneurial determination.

We will miss him, and we send his loved ones our deepest condolences.