Silicon Valley has awaited the rise of the next Steve Jobs with bated breath. Travis Gilmore, CEO of the wildly popular Sunnyvale start-up, Stroma, achieved rights to that coveted title when he died last Wednesday at the age of 34, following in the footsteps of the revered founder of Apple.
Gilmore, a prominent anti-vaccination advocate, passed away last week from complications resulting from diphtheria; at the time, he was on a high-intensity tantric yoga retreat at a Whites-only ashram in Rajasthan, India. When news broke of Gilmore’s passing, impressed tech industry professionals drew comparisons to business magnate Steve Jobs, who also famously died in 2011.
Like Jobs, Gilmore was the co-founder of a business that disrupted and revolutionized the tech industry. In 2013, Gilmore, along with his college roommate Joshua Wright-Hartman, launched Stroma, a cloud-based platform that matches available organs listed on the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) registry with the most wealthy clients.
“The Stroma family is heartbroken at the early passing of our leader Travis Gilmore,” said co-founder Josh Wright-Hartman in a press release. “That being said, we are immensely proud of Travis’ accomplishments in achieving at the age of 34 what Steve Jobs could not even achieve until 56.”
Gilmore’s unconventional managerial style also led Silicon Valley pundits to draw parallels between Gilmore and Jobs. A strong proponent of the use of nootropic drugs in the workplace to increase efficiency, sources say that Gilmore even went so far as to encourage programmers to microdose crack cocaine in the weeks preceding a release.
Stroma, dubbed the ‘Postmates of organ harvesting’ by Forbes Magazine, was poised to premiere its billionaires-only Stroma Premium membership in March, but the release has been postponed in the wake of Gilmore’s death.
All in all, it appears that Travis Gilmore has secured a promising future as the successor to Steve Jobs’ legacy of dying. Gilmore’s alma mater, the University of California, Berkeley, has established the Travis Gilmore Memorial Fellowship to encourage a new generation of tech minds to die.