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Tristan O'Tierney, Square Co-Founder, Dies at Age 35 (sfchronicle.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the San Francisco Chronicle:
Tristan O'Tierney, a co-founder of San Francisco payments company Square, died Feb. 23 in Ocala, Fla., of causes related to addiction, his family said. He was 35...
His family is awaiting an official cause of death from officials. "I do know that it was in relation to his addiction," [his mother] Pamela Tierney said. "I know he got to the hospital, he couldn't breathe and they couldn't revive him." O'Tierney was in a three-month rehabilitation program in Ocala and had been battling addiction for three years, Tierney said. O'Tierney openly discussed his struggles with addiction on social media. "As some of you may know, I've been battling with addiction for these past few years," he wrote in September in a now-deleted Instagram post that he also shared on Twitter. "With some success. A lot of failure too though."
Bloomberg remembers him as a former engineer at Yahoo and Apple who was hired to develop Square's original mobile payment app in 2009, then stayed on until 2013.
"In addition to his parents, O'Tierney is survived by his three-old-year daughter, according to an obituary on the website for the funeral home."
His family is awaiting an official cause of death from officials. "I do know that it was in relation to his addiction," [his mother] Pamela Tierney said. "I know he got to the hospital, he couldn't breathe and they couldn't revive him." O'Tierney was in a three-month rehabilitation program in Ocala and had been battling addiction for three years, Tierney said. O'Tierney openly discussed his struggles with addiction on social media. "As some of you may know, I've been battling with addiction for these past few years," he wrote in September in a now-deleted Instagram post that he also shared on Twitter. "With some success. A lot of failure too though."
Bloomberg remembers him as a former engineer at Yahoo and Apple who was hired to develop Square's original mobile payment app in 2009, then stayed on until 2013.
"In addition to his parents, O'Tierney is survived by his three-old-year daughter, according to an obituary on the website for the funeral home."
I have been following Tristan ever since I used his twitter client on the original iPhone, Twinkle, which brightened my days as an early adopter. Itâ(TM)s interesting to me how much emphasis is put on his addiction and time at Square, whereas his time at Apple and as an early iPhone / iOS developer really was the affectionate and incredible context that struck me as profound. The innovation from those early days is still unparalleled and Twitter is no longer even remotely the same place we met at eleven years ago. RIP Tristan. You were one of the good ones.
Seems like rehab isn’t doing a very good job. You can clean a person up and prevent them from using, but unless you address the underlying issues that lead to them seeking out the drugs in the first place they’ll eventually wind back up in the same place. Drug use and addiction can be as much of a symptom as it is a disease.
I think that’s why we need to end the war on drugs and decriminalize their use. We spend too much energy focusing on the wrong solution and wonder why nothing seems to change.