“Dan Freidinburg defines life differently,” wrote Natalie Spencer, Director of Startup Grind Jackson Hole. An adventrepreneur, inventor, and activist, Dan beamed with charisma in front of a packed room of founders, sharing wisdoms from the secret depths of Silicon Valley and the Great Barrier Reef alike. When not working as Head of Privacy for Google[x], Freidinburg was a committed “activist adventurer,” in chase of thrill for a greater good. His latest movement: a third attempt at reaching the summit of Mount Everest while raising funds for Nepali orphanages. As founder of the Google Adventure team, his troop even brought equipment to record the trek for Google Street View. "It was an experience we wanted to share with everyone,” Fredinburg said.   

On Day 23 of his climb, Dan was spotting his favorite yaks and negotiating for an airdropped satellite TV on behalf of a soccer-loving friend. The trip was on-track and the mood was joyous. Just hours later, a tragic 7.8 earthquake devastated Nepal. The resulting avalanche crashed through Mt Everest and into Dan’s climbing troop. He died on April 25th, 2015 on what has become the deadliest day in Mount Everest history. Yet Dan’s vision of the world remains unstoppable. As part of an ongoing tribute, Dan’s friends and family have contributed almost $100,000 not just in his memory, but in memory of the more than 7,000 deaths in and around Nepal.

Much of the funds have already reached Nepal and are being directed towards youth in greatest need.

In an hour-long conversation with the Jackson Hole audience, Dan painted a bold vision of the future: technologically ambitious, driven by consciousness of our planet and our communities, and always with a dash of adventure. The video captured at this event is thought to be his last public appearance, but, with the founding of The Dan Freidinburg Foundation by friends and family, Dan’s mission will continue through his most impactful projects.

You can also listen Dan’s chat on iTunes or Stitcher.

Through the conversation, four big themes emerged that seem to have driven Dan’s love of life. Video and audio alone can’t hope to capture Dan’s nuanced insight and abundant enthusiasm for those that haven’t had the luck of meeting the man himself, but a hint of his legacy begins to emerge from these projects that have defined his life.

Technology

Dan’s began his career at Boeing the same way most recent college graduates do: a mix of desperation and curiosity. He laughs as he remembers doing interviews with anyone who would take take him and, in front of his Boeing interviewer, getting excited about a haphazardly placed binder. It’s title: “Future Combat Systems.” As soon as he heard the suggestions that its contents was closer to Star Wars and the Terminator rather than plane engines, he was hooked - and hired. From building the future and keeping important innovations under wraps at Boeing, continuing to Google seemed natural.

A role as a project manager appealed to Dan’s entrepreneurial side and a position with Google[x] as Head of Privacy appealed to his desire for broad impact. He gravitated towards moonshots in both is life and his work. From the Google Loon Balloon to drone delivery and self-driving vehicles, Dan has considered himself an intrapreneur. Beyond the safety net of salary, intrapreneurship is no less challenging than entrepreneurship. Dan talked about the path and challenges of innovating within an organization:

How to Become an Intrapreneur

“The route to becoming an intrepreneur is similar to the route to becoming an entrepreneur: really looking at a particular market or industry or problem to be solved, identifying one that resonates with you, and then coming up with practical solutions that would solve your own problem.”

On Working Within Bureaucracies

“All big companies have some things in common: ultimately, there are people who have been there a long time and create workflows to make sure things work efficiently. What’s special at Google is, there are a lot of people constantly changing those rules. Being an intrepreneur, you need to change many of the norms yourself."

At Google[x], Dan worked with forensics, detection, sensors, cryptography, and more. His knowledge of technology’s potential wasn’t just deep - it bordered on scary. During our fireside chat, Dan - himself a holder of multiple patents - shared some of the inventions coming out of research labs at top universities.

In one example, researchers at Dan’s alma mater Stanford have found a way to use the a user’s walking style - tracked by a device’s accelerometer (present in any device that adjusts to the screen being turned from vertical to horizontal) - to dependably predict a user’s weight, height, gender and even identity. On the opposite coast at MIT, researchers have been able to reconstruct a high-speed video of microvibrations on a bag of chips to reproduce the sound in the room.

Dan’s specialty, besides creating thrills, just happened to be breaking these prediction systems to protect user privacy. In the full talk, Dan talks effortlessly about how companies and individuals can thwart such invasions.

Adventure

A friend and colleague, host Natalie knew Dan well: enough to know to invite him to Jackson Hole not just with the promise of a captive audience of entrepreneurs, but also backcountry skiing. In his free time, Dan liked to climb: he reached five of the Seven Summits - the tallest points on each continent. He could be spotted at Silicon Valley’s favorite getaway, Burning Man, in some of the most incredible costumes - but he brought this energy directly into his work and his mission.

Part of LiveDan.com, #adventureswithdan captures the energy and dedication Dan committed to experiencing life deeply and often.

Bringing the World to Everest

Through commemorations and public social postings, Dan’s friends remember him for bringing a sense of adventure to everything he touched. His work at Google was no different: Dan took the first opportunity he could to merge his passions with the founding of the Google Adventure team. Building - and justifying - the project was Dan’s most publicly prominent intrapreneurial pursuit. He shares, “The larger the company, the more persuasive you need to be” to make a project like this happen. He advises befriending corporate champions - those who can help you get connected and win favor with departments which will fund, staff, and authorize your plan. Start with strategy - knowing the motivations of all parties and aligning your own goals with theirs - wrapped in bold charisma, he suggests. For Dan, once Google Street Views of exotic locales like the Great Barrier Reef and Mount Everest hit the public - to the great excitement of media and commentators - he knew he was onto something.

Saving Carstensz Pyramid

One especially memorable adventure took Dan and the #adventureswithdan crew to Indonesia to climb the complex Carstensz Pyramid - also home to the world’s largest gold mine. The climb is treacherous - such that when a dear friend was injured and required medical attention, the closest hospital was 10 days away, requiring the team double back through the jungle behind them. Dan thought fast: their alternative was to cut through the Grasberg Mine. Dan’s team acted quickly, delving into the mine and bringing their friend to receive medical attention beyond the Pyramid. Acting just as quickly, the miners jailed Dan for interrogation.

It wouldn’t be easy to explain what an American technologist was doing in a remote Indonesian gold mine - so he took the opposite approach, instead interrogating his captors about the nature of their mining and their plans for the region. Before being safely released to complete his journey, Dan had amassed enough information to alert the authorities to expansion plans that would damage the UNESCO World Heritage Site, leading to a new conservation initiative.

A nearly deadly mistake and a capture had become another opportunity for a great story and, again, a deep impact. Like it was to Dan, every entrepreneur’s conversation is a chance to learn and improve your strategy, being flexible as the plan is thrown out.

Impact

At the core of his life and work was a deep commitment to impact. Like many creatives and entrepreneurs, Dan’s inspiration is a double-edged sword: “I was and am very ADHD. As a child, it was very difficult to focus on anything,” he diagnosed, “and now it pays off because I get to work on so many different things.” His work at Google[x], however, makes this an advantage - “I’m seeing all these different projects - whether it’s autonomous vehicles, or wearables, or in the home space. My ADHD has been cured by having a series of problems to apply my engine to.” As a small sample of the types of problems he works on: launching an internal air traffic control to track the internet-bearing Google Loon Balloons, or a pill that uses technology on the nano level to detect irregular cell growth. Of course, these don’t include still classified projects - those, Dan says, he is most excited about. While the crosshatching of different projects and technologies is what kept Dan’s mind occupied, he revealed it was the core question of Google[x] that spoke to him in the first place: “What can change the lives of a billion people?”

#SAVETHEICE

It wasn’t just Google[x] that called to Dan’s sense of changing the world - even a vacation was a chance to do something important. In a trip through Europe, he saw a chance to educate his generation (and himself) about environmental change. How? Through Vikings. Dan joined Dr. Mike North and Max Goldstein to start #SavetheIce: an educational adventure-comedy bringing Dan and his friends to climate risk sites vicariously through the power of social media. Their antics proved so engaging that Vladas Lasas, a co-founder of Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room sought an audience with the Viking horde when they crossed into Lithuania to collaborate on bringing the cause of environmental change to a Millennial audience. ““The good part about being that ridiculous is we manage to draw a lot of attention,” Dan said, with the takeaway any entrepreneur: play to your strengths, especially if they’re shock and awe.

The ice-loving Viking troop made its way through the Baltic States by car-ship - complete with dragon on the bow.

Doing the Laundry

Dan didn’t just live technology, impact, and adventure: he sought to bring it to others. Inspired by the amount of data created by sensors across the world, Dan found a niche in impact entrepreneurship: combining novel ways of gathering data with accomplishing altruistic goals. To this end, Dan founded an incubation space where these entrepreneurs could work together and receive the support of Silicon Valley veterans. Built in an old laundromat, the space is called The Laundry. An entrepreneur at The Laundry might work, for example, using drones to track deforestation, ice melting, or sex trafficking.

True to his shock and awe tactics, he brought in investors to experience the space - and put sledgehammers in their hands. The trick to making his pitch memorable: giving the backers the opportunity to literally break down the walls to make room for a batch of impact entrepreneurs to take up residency in the space. A great team continues to stand behind opening The Laundry to the first batch of entrepreneurs once the incubator officially launches, though the space has already held events to connect and educate impact-focused founders.

Tribe

Outpourings of love have filled social media since Dan’s death. More than words, Dan’s tribe of entrepreneurs, technologists, artists, adventurers - and even strangers inspired by his life - have come together to found The Dan Fredinburg Foundation to keep his many projects thriving. Dan’s stories and assistance will continue to change and inspire the world. To add your voice to the story, contribute to the Dan Fredinburg Foundation -- but, if you’re a fearless entrepreneur equally driven by technology, impact, and adventure, you can get your hands dirty at San Francisco’s soon to launch Laundry venture incubator.

An introduction to the just-launched Dan Fredinburg Foundation, raising funds for Nepal and the projects of other impact entrepreneurs.

Hundreds of posts have paid tribute to Dan and his mission, but the one that seems to ring the truest - to an adventurer and altruist who has lived more in 33 years than many in a lifetime - comes from Max Stossel, a dear friend whose letter was one of the many to be read along the hike to the summit of Everest.

You must be really high up for this written echo (echo echo). Everyone you know and love is eventually going to die (die die die). When we do, we leave behind our stories. Those stories are told and passed on, impacting the lives of others until they are stories (stories stories stories). Your story has already greatly impacted mine for the better. With each adventure you return with stories that most people wouldn't dream of experiencing themselves (selves selves selves). Thank you for pushing the human race to be greater, more daring, and to truly live life rather than survive it (it it it). I love you, brother. Please return safely with stories (stories stories). And even if you don't... We'll all be horrified, saddened, and heartbroken, that we can't create new stories with you, but we'll also know that you've already lived the equivalent of at least 100 lifetimes.   Max Stossel