Subscriber Exclusive: Lee Holloway's personality was consistent for decades—until it wasn't. It took years of detective work to figure out why he became unrecognizable. (From 2020)
Lee's rudeness perplexed his old friends. He had built his life around Cloudflare, once vowing to not cut his hair until the startup's web traffic surpassed that of Yahoo. He had always been easygoing, happy to mentor his colleagues or hang out over lunch. At a birthday party for Zatlyn, he enchanted some children, regaling them with stories about the joys of coding. The idea of Lee picking fights simply didn't compute.
At home with his parents in San Jose, Lee, 38, was restless. He paced the rooms and hallways of the 1,550-square-foot house, a loop he'd been tracing since he'd moved in with them two years earlier. He didn't speak. His parents had the TV on, and they called him over whenever Prince or Zatlyn appeared onscreen.
Lee and his friends would cart their computers to each other's houses to play games together. He became curious about the machines themselves and started learning computer science, first in high school, then at a local community college and UC Santa Cruz, where an unlikely set of circumstances connected him with Matthew Prince.
Everything you ever wanted to know about Equifax, Mariott, and the problem with social security numbers.Lee and Prince kept working at Unspam from their respective cities, but as Prince was wrapping up business school, Lee called to tell him he was considering other job offers. Prince countered with a new and rather audacious pitch: He and a classmate, Michelle Zatlyn, had hit on a startup idea they thought had potential.
Prince started his pitch. “I'm Matthew Prince, this is Michelle Zatlyn, Lee Holloway is in the back of the room. We're the three cofounders of Cloudflare,” he boomed, stabbing the air with his finger as he spoke. In fact, Lee was backstage furiously fixing a long list of bugs. Prince held his breath when he ran the software, and, perhaps miraculously, it worked. It really worked. In the hour after he walked onstage, Cloudflare got 1,000 new customers, doubling in size.
But around 2011 she started noticing that Lee was growing distant and forming some odd new habits. He spent a lot more time asleep, for one. After long workdays, she recalls, he'd walk in the door, take off his shoes, and immediately pass out on the floor. Their cat sometimes curled up and napped on his chest. His son, not yet 2, would clamber over him, trying and failing to rouse him to play.
Lee and his Cloudflare cofounders, Michelle Zatlyn and Matthew Prince, attend a holiday party in 2011.Alexandra moved away, Lee was sitting at a table with a couple of coworkers, including Kristin Tarr, who ran communications at Cloudflare. She'd just published a blog post describing how customers could enableon their accounts. He turned to her and said, “I read your blog post. It was really good.
“He is typing, typing, and I don't think anyone dared to interrupt. His hoodie is on, he's in the zone. He's doing brain surgery on this thing.” The other engineers immediately started reviewing his code. By the morning, the debugging process began for real. The gambit worked, and all of their existing customers suddenly got encryption. It was a proud moment. Says Graham-Cumming: “The size of the encrypted web doubled overnight.”
Not long after, Lee and Kristin took a trip to Europe, spending a few days in France, just as Lee and Alexandra had years earlier. Kristin had never been to Paris, and she was excited to explore the city. She ended up doing that on her own, while Lee again spent days asleep in their hotel room. “This is so weird,” Kristin remembers thinking. On their trip to Italy, he'd been eager to jump out of bed and visit museums and cafés, and walk around.
Eventually, in 2016, they decided Lee had to leave the company. “He kind of just said, yup, that sounds about right,” Prince says. They threw him a going-away party that July. Prince thanked him in a speech with tears streaming down his cheeks. Lee stood beside him with a beer in hand, a thin smile on his face.
She kept trying to probe what was on his mind, and he kept replying, “I'll do better.” The repetitiveness of his answers struck her as robotic. It seemed of a piece with the way he now touched every tree he passed on their walks. “I think deep down I knew something was wrong,” Kristin says. She thought maybe he'd developed PTSD after the surgery or was struggling with a bout of depression. She'd been asking him to see a counselor with her.
That evening, Kristin started Googling. She pulled up the website of the Memory and Aging Center and started reading the descriptions of brain atrophy diseases. She knew immediately the neurologist was right. And in that moment she glimpsed the future: This was going to kill her husband. The family sat stunned at the neurologist's words. The brain scans were undeniable. On a wall-mounted screen the doctors showed a cross-section of the four lobes of Lee's brain. In a healthy brain, the familiar, loopy folds of tissue appear white or gray and push up against the edges of the cranium, filling every available space. Lee's brain looked nothing like that.
Because it is relatively unknown and can resemble Alzheimer's or a psychiatric disorder, FTD is often hard to diagnose. As in Lee's case, the early stages can be misinterpreted as signs of nothing more serious than a midlife crisis. Patients can spend years shuttling to marriage counselors, human resources departments, therapists, and psychologists. By the time patients learn the name of their disorder, they are often unable to grasp the gravity of their situation.
Eventually, many FTD patients end up as apathetic as Lee, the light of their personhood dimmed to a pale flicker. Apathy also leads to incontinence, as patients lose the desire to take even basic care of themselves. She and Lee's parents grew increasingly worried he could get lost or mugged or wander into traffic. His parents, who are in their sixties, volunteered to take over Lee's care, and in the fall of 2017, Kristin agreed it was time for him to move in with them in San Jose while they figured out a long-term plan. “It's too hard to keep him safe in San Francisco,” his father, Rendon Holloway, says. “He has to have his walks.
As the months passed, he spoke less and less. In one video from July 2018, Lee has his arm wrapped around his son while he reads him a bedtime book. Lee mumbles the words unevenly, without inflection, and hurries through the paperboard pages. As we sat in the family's living room, Kathy described caring for her son, even as he grew increasingly distant. She misses the warmth in their daily interactions. “He used to come give me a hug and say, ‘I love you, Mom,’ ” she says. “No more.”
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