In memoriam, Richard Medic

In late October Richard Medic caught meningitis in Bosnia and died at the age of 50. The only way I can try to process that is to write this.

This is what I didn’t have the courage to step up and say at the memorial event held in Brussels a week after his funeral.

I first met Richard around 2010. I was building the online comms department of a Brussels-based consultancy, working late to make a rich German richer. Apart from hiring staff I was developing a network of specialist subcontractors, which is why one day Richard eased his lanky frame into the seat opposite my desk.

The first thing about him was his voice. Until he spoke I didn’t know he was Australian, born in Melbourne to a Bosnian family. Unlike many Australians his accent was not strident: his voice was calm, measured, relaxed, with a hint of mischief. It brought me home immediately.

We hit it off, personally and professionally. I was somewhat in awe. He was 6 years younger but was already building his own business rather than someone else’s, something I didn’t find the courage to do until years later. He was intelligent, generous and thoughtful.

And he had Soonfeed. In fact, every time I spoke to him I heard about Soonfeed. So did my clients. One of them complained, but I didn’t care as, like most of my clients 10 years ago, they were idiots without dreams.

I was quite surprised to discover that Soonfeed’s still going. When I met him the idea was intriguing: online tech had reached the point where livestreams could become a thing, but noone knew how large that thing would become. But even if it remained a niche, niches need guides, and guides grow niches, so why not?

The problem, of course, was by then Facebook et al had online innovation in a stranglehold. It was almost impossible to build anything interesting: the only innovation anyone was pursuing was “how to make my content do better on Facebook”. For people like Richard with a project like Soonfeed, there were two options and only one likely outcome:

• Strategy: integrate with Facebook and other walled gardens.
  Outcome: if successful, they’d close whatever API you were using and replicate your service themselves;
• Strategy: build outside Facebook and other walled gardens.
  Outcome: if successful, they’d replicate your service and crush you by steering their users away from your service towards theirs.

That’s why I’m so angry he’s gone. It’s literally been only a few weeks since large M-shaped cracks (Metaverse, Musk) started forming in the walled gardens’ walls. If things go as I hope, we just might see a return to the open web, where innovators like Richard actually have a chance to build new things. But he won’t be around to see it.

Because he did see things, more clearly than most. That’s why, I think, he had an unerring instinct for events (and being Australian no shortage of courage) — hence Soonfeed, Happeningo, jumping off bridges, @askschuman and getting “his notes” onto the EU Council podium. Out of the entire Brussels Bubble, he was probably the only other person I knew who really saw Madelina Kay (aka EU Supergirl). I still don’t know what it means that the most supportive Europeans she found in the Brussels Bubble were both Australian.

After that episode he and I saw each other occasionally but we lost touch: we were both building our own things, and then the pandemic happened, and of course we always knew where to find each other so we’d get around to seeing each other one of these days, right?

But we didn’t. And now I never will.

If I learn anything from this, let me not take my friends for granted, to not rely on social media to stay in touch, but to reach out and see them again face2face, today rather than tomorrow, this week rather than next year.

— Mathew