Alan Weinberger, R.I.P.
A few deeply inadequate thoughts about a channel legend and the legacy he leaves behind.
If you knew him at all, I’m guessing you’ve heard by now that ASCII Group founder and chairman Alan Weinberger passed away late last month. If you didn’t know him—which would surprise me a little given that he seemed to have met everyone in the tech industry at some point—you may not fully appreciate why so many people, me among them, are so saddened by the news.
The biggest reason, as many others have noted, is because Weinberger (pictured) was about as warm, generous, and endlessly interesting a person as you’re likely to meet. But I’ll point out a few other things worth noting as well:
The channel, as ConnectWise and TD SYNNEX among many others appreciate, is defined as much as anything by the go-giver spirit of community that animates its members. Weinberger, who founded The ASCII Group when there barely was a channel we’d recognize today, deserves a lot of credit for inventing that culture and nurturing it across more than 40 years.
Weinberger’s biggest motivation in creating The ASCII Group was to help small IT businesses stand up to huge ones through the power of collective action. The rise of PE-based managed services giants, per a story I posted a year ago, only re-doubled Weinberger’s devotion to ensuring that MSPs who prize autonomy over scale can fight much larger competitors on an even playing field.
A little over a fifth of businesses never make it to their first birthday. A little under two thirds never celebrate their tenth. Weinberger’s business is still going strong at age 41. Hard to overstate what an against-the-odds achievement that is under any circumstances and especially in an industry that changes as often and significantly as ours.
One last thing: The team behind The ASCII Group isn’t a large one. It’s a small, very effective, close-knit one that functions (in all the good and, on some days undoubtedly, bad ways) like a family as much as a company, and a hugely important member of that family isn’t there anymore. I’ve experienced what that feels like earlier in my career. It’s hard.
My sincerest condolences, then, to both of Weinberger’s families: the one he made with his wife Lauren and the one he built at The ASCII Group. A memorial page with links to non-profits you can donate to in Weinberger’s memory is located here.