Siri creator Kittlaus dodges death
SAN FRANCISCO — No matter what tech innovations Dag Kittlaus creates in the coming years, the 49-year-old speech recognition expert will be best known as the man who sold Siri to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
Now, strangely, the two figures have something else in common. According to an interview with Recode's Kara Swisher, Kittlaus reveals that in a routine screening he discovered he had the same rare type of pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer that felled Jobs in 2011.
“It was the luckiest set of circumstances, because without that exam it most certainly would have spread and I would be dead,” Kittlaus said of an executive exam he voluntarily underwent at the University of Colorado in November.
Caught early, the lemon-sized tumor was excised in surgery at Johns Hopkins University, along with half of Kittlaus' pancreas, his spleen and gall bladder. In another twist of fate, one of his nurses was named Siri.
Kittlaus — whose latest invention is a Siri-on-steroids voice recognition software called Viv, which Samsung bought last fall — is back at work and feeling philosophical.
“The prognosis is very good and I am incredibly lucky," he said. "But the biggest thing I learned is that tomorrow is promised to no one.”
Tech industry veterans should be well aware of life's fleeting nature these days, between the untimely passing of (Sheryl Sandberg's husband) SurveyMonkey CEO Dave Goldberg in 2015 at age 47 and Slingbox founder Blake Krikorian in 2016 at age 48.
Peter Thiel: Don't compete, create something new
One tech veteran who has long been obsessed with cheating death is PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, whose profile has gone national of late due to his early support of then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Thiel is now one of the president-elect's tech industry advisors.
Thiel recently gave an interview to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in which he expressed shock that more people weren't concerned about their own mortality. He is curious about a blood regeneration method called parabiosis, and thinks humans shouldn't accept death so readily.
“We have to be more experimental in all our medical procedures,” he told Dowd. “We should not go gently into that good night.”
Kittlaus just cheated the grim reaper. Through a bit of good fortune and the skills of medical experts, he heads back to his office at Samsung. But it remains to be seen if such incidents will have a sobering and transformative impact on the notoriously hard-charging lifestyles of tech entrepreneurs.
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