In an evening Hacker News digest, a biography of Lee Holloway surfaced—a man almost no one has heard of, even though a significant chunk of the internet runs on his code. Co-founder and technical architect of Cloudflare: the network that today processes over ten percent of all requests on the web grew from his code. And then—the most horrifying part. Starting around age thirty, Holloway "went bad from success": became apathetic, rude, left the company, got divorced. That's how everyone around him saw it. In reality, he was being slowly erased by frontotemporal dementia—bvFTD, a rare disease that kills personality before memory.
I dismissed the "genius went crazy" plot immediately—it's a cliché. Something else hooked me: a disease where a person remembers everything but stops being themselves—that's a direct experiment on the question "where does my 'I' physically live." Philosophers argued about this for two and a half thousand years, and neurodegeneration runs the experiment without an ethics committee. And the second line: if the most recognizable symptom of bvFTD is "person became strange," then in an industry where everyone has always been strange, this disease has perfect camouflage. I dug in—and didn't regret it: from the irony of Cloudflare's own cookie walls to the broker who suddenly started painting pictures in lavender tones.
Holloway's technical biography is a textbook on what a real founding engineer looks like, not "guy with an idea." He met Matthew Prince through Professor Arthur Keller at UC Santa Cruz—shared patent, shared anti-spam idea. Then came Unspam Technologies in Utah, where Lee literally lived in the basement of Prince's house, working for food and shelter. A side project birthed Project Honey Pot—a system that collected data on spammers. And in 2009, Prince spent an hour on the phone about a plan to "not just track threats but block them," and Holloway gave the famous reply: "Yeah, sounds good, let's do it."
What followed was legend. The TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 demo that Lee fixed backstage while Prince kept his fingers crossed onstage: within an hour of the pitch, Cloudflare doubled its client base. Night coding in 2014 when the entire office was afraid to breathe, and "the volume of the encrypted web doubled in one night"—that was his Universal SSL. The Arduino toaster that sang with each client registration. Three tweets in his entire life, the first—"Pondering the nature of web exploits." But an important correction often lost on the internet: Holloway didn't invent anycast—the technique has been working since the late eighties in root DNS servers. His contribution was industrial implementation: the Anycast network and Cell architecture on which Cloudflare scaled to a market share of over ten percent of all internet traffic.
Yet Holloway himself nearly vanished from the company's history. When Cloudflare prepared for its IPO, it turned out that even some employees didn't know about the third co-founder. Prince and Zatlyn wrote him into the S-1 with a separate acknowledgment: "the genius who designed our platform and built the early technical team." IPO code name—"Project Holloway." According to SEC documents, Holloway's trusts owned 3.2% of all shares—at a $3.2 billion valuation that's about a hundred million dollars, going to a family that by that point was dealing not with wealth but with caring for a silent husband and son.
The first wife, Alexandra, noticed the first oddities back in 2011. The man who coded to death metal for hours started coming home and falling asleep on the floor—the cat would settle down to sleep right on his chest. He refused to go to parties, on a family vacation in France slept three days in the hotel. In 2012, when Alexandra was preparing for a NASA internship with their child, Lee calmly asked for a divorce—no scandal, with level politeness that scares more than yelling. Colleagues drew the obvious conclusion: money and success went to his head. Prince later recalled this phrasing verbatim: "We all thought he got rich, married a new girl, and became an asshole."
The new wife Kristin, also a Cloudflare employee, saw the same thing from the other side. At first—normal life: Opeth, Golden State Warriors, five-kilometer runs, engagement in Rome. Then—heart surgery at Stanford in January 2015, and Kristin would later call it the turning point: "the heart came out of surgery stronger than ever, but mentally he never recovered." Summer 2015 at his own wedding, Lee was "like someone had washed the color out of his personality." At work—blowing up at colleagues and playing games on his phone in the middle of meetings, Prince messages him privately: "Are you playing a game right now? People are noticing." For the company's founder, they write up a performance improvement plan—a document for weak employees. It doesn't help. In 2016, Holloway leaves the company he built; Prince sobs during the farewell speech, Lee stands nearby with a beer and a thin smile.
What came home was a spectrum of symptoms that in psychiatry textbooks would be split across three different diagnoses. He slept almost around the clock. Watched "Home Alone"—according to Kristin—up to ten times a week. Counted floorboards in the house and trees in the yard. Touched every corner of the countertop and every tree on walks. For the birth of their second child, he slept two days, woke up—and started an argument with the doctor about epidural anesthesia for his wife. To all questions he answered with one phrase: "I'll get better"—with that level, robotic intonation by which Kristin would later recognize the disease. At family therapy, while she cried, he stood up, silently took the bathroom key away, and came back.
The path to diagnosis took years—and this isn't a peculiarity of Holloway's story, but a typical trajectory. Kristin dragged her husband to therapists, cardiologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychologists; in January 2017 a specialist formulated the fork: "either deep psychological breakdown or something neurological." A psychiatrist said the word "dementia," and Kristin brushed it off: dementia is an old person's disease, people who forget. In March came the MRI result: "brain atrophy, inconsistent with patient age." The neurologist up to that moment had found nothing through behavioral tests—Lee was young, looked healthy, and answered coherently. The picture on the screen left no options: in the frontal lobe—black voids, dead tissue where a living person should have folds of gray matter.
At the UCSF Memory and Aging Center—the world center for frontotemporal degeneration—a consultation made the diagnosis after three days of examinations: behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. To the question "do you know why you're here?" Lee answered: "My wife brought me." Hearing the verdict—no medications, terminal course, ahead lay loss of speech, mobility, and swallowing—he maintained complete calm and against the backdrop of a sobbing family complimented the doctor on her wedding ring. Brother Alaric understood in that very moment how deeply his brother had already changed: the right emotion in the right situation—and not a drop of the right content.
How typical this delay is shows in the numbers. A large study of survival in bvFTD (Neurology, 2010) recorded an average gap between first symptoms and diagnosis of 3.6 ± 2.5 years. Fresh multicenter work from McGill (Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 2025) examined the histories of 609 patients with bvFTD: a third of them (33%) managed to receive an initial psychiatric diagnosis after symptom onset and before the correct one was made—most often depression, then anxiety disorders and psychoses; for 13%, this diagnosis was ultimately recognized as simply wrong. The most frustrating thing in this data: misdiagnosed patients were on average five and a half years younger than the rest. Youth is a risk factor for misdiagnosis because it doesn't occur to anyone to look for dementia in someone who isn't old yet.
To understand why bvFTD is philosophy's grasshopper among neurodiseases, you need to understand what it does. Regular Alzheimer's dementia hits memory first: a person loses the thread of days, faces, roads. bvFTD strikes the frontal and temporal lobes and the so-called salience network—a distributed system of zones that decides what matters right now: whose emotion is on whose face, which signal is dangerous, why react at all. UCSF neuropsychologist Virginia Sturm describes it this way: "Emotions drive most decisions; without these systems you're not the same person—the anchors of personality are gone, the boundaries of self become blurred."
Hence the signature set: loss of empathy, loss of shame, loss of interest, compulsive rituals. Classic cases from clinical literature—the broker who suddenly started dressing all in lavender and painting, then stealing change and swimming naked in public pools; the husband who, while his wife bled from a cut, demanded they first return garden shears to the neighbor. Memory meanwhile works—and that's the main horror. The person remembers the wedding, remembers the children, remembers how to use a fork, but everything that made these memories his—priorities, attachments, brakes—has rotted away. Philosophy had names for this long before neurology: Locke tied selfhood to memory, Parfit—to "psychological connectedness" through time, chains of mental states. bvFTD is an experimental test of Parfit: the chains don't all break at once, but one by one, and no one—including the patient himself—can say where exactly the person ended.
The disease's statistics are paradoxically modest: prevalence—from 2 to 20 cases per hundred thousand people, for people under sixty—the most common form of dementia period. Yet experts unanimously believe real cases are much higher: the disease masquerades as psychiatry, average survival after onset is around 7.6 years (in the general sample up to 9), and by the time of diagnosis most patients no longer recognize either the diagnosis or themselves. The Holloway family learned that Lee's FTD was sporadic—not genetic but "random," as happens in 50–70% of cases. The kind of luck nobody tells stories about.
There's a plot in this story that sounds like a joke but is confirmed by peer-reviewed science. In 2023, JAMA Neurology published work from UCSF (Bruce Miller's group, the man who's been collecting a "sleeping artists" collection in frontal dementia for twenty years): out of 689 FTD-spectrum patients, 17—that is, 2.5%—suddenly, de novo, awakened visual artistic talent. People who never seriously drew start creating compositions exhibited in galleries. Creativity switches on approximately at the moment of symptom onset and disproportionately often—with temporal atrophy.
The mechanism the work proposes is engineer-elegant: frontal lobes normally suppress the dorsomedial occipital cortex, the visual processing zone. When atrophy eats away the brakes, occipital zones disinhibit—and the stream of images the brain filtered all its life as "noise" gets output to the terminal. The disease doesn't add talent; it removes the censorship under which talent lay unopened. This, by the way, is a perfect illustration of what frontal lobes are in general: not so much "generators of genius" as dispatchers who decide which of your impulses are worth releasing to prod today. Remove the dispatcher—and someone starts yelling at doctors, and someone suddenly paints pictures.
The ending of this story is something I can't get out of my head. After the 2019 IPO, the family had money. Kristin bought a five-thousand-square-foot house with an acre of land on the California coast and hired a landscape architect—not for beauty but for a safety protocol. Zigzag paths so Lee could walk endlessly, as he loved. Perimeter fence. Only non-toxic plants. And not a single nut or fruit tree—because the next stage of the disease, dysphagia, means any hard fruit becomes a choking risk. This is a design document written in the language of death prognosis: the man who designed infrastructure for billions of requests lives out his days in a garden designed for his future inability to swallow.
The final scenes Wired delivers in whispers. Lee lives with his parents, physically strong and already nonverbal. Scrolls on his phone searching the word "Cloudflare." Sometimes silently calls Kristin—just breathing in the receiver. Once liked a post on LinkedIn. And once sent her her own photos—Halloween, park, Christmas—with a caption of two words: "the love." Two years after that essay, Kristin writes in SELF a line worth any literary novel: her son started potty training—the same week Lee began losing control over bodily functions; the son started talking—Lee fell silent. Two brain trajectories, learning and decay, ran parallel in one house in opposite directions. Kristin is now on the AFTD board of directors, runs a research fund in the family's name and an annual FTD physician summit—"I can't save my husband, but I can change the future for others." And the disease meanwhile stopped being obscure: in 2023 Bruce Willis received an FTD diagnosis (the family directly asked to direct the world's attention to the disease), in 2024—Wendy Williams. Fame that saved no one but at least made the disease's name pronounceable.
My opinion after this digging—pure engineering depression with a taste of clarity. First conclusion: personality is not a soul or a monolith but a stack of executive functions, and it has a precise hardware location. bvFTD is the hardest proof in existence: "I" can be uninstalled in pieces, with fully working memory. We programmers joke all our lives about "glitch in the matrix," but here—a glitch in the cortex, and the joke stops being funny when you see how the system keeps running though the user inside is already gone.
Second conclusion—about the industry we live in. "He got rich and became an asshole"—this version was accepted by colleagues, friends, and wives because it fit perfectly into the cultural narrative about success. In a world where strange character is acceptable currency for genius, bvFTD in men at career peaks masks itself almost perfectly. Statistics confirm: a third of patients first end up with psychiatrists. The cheap practical consequence worth dragging into every company: if a mature, stably good person abruptly and uncharacteristically changes personality—apathy, loss of empathy, rituals—that's grounds for an MRI, not a PIP. A neurological diagnosis made five years earlier is years of conscious life that otherwise burn up in psychotherapists' offices.
And third—about the irony without which I wouldn't have carried the mood of this text. While I gathered materials, UCSF and JAMA pages twice refused to open: Cloudflare—Holloway's product—blocked me from articles about his own disease. The system he built outlived his personality and honestly performs its work: filters, protects, repels attacks. The medium outlived the author, and no one noticed the substitution. Somewhere in this there's consolation—the architecture proved stronger than its creator, and billions of people every day use what he wrote while he was himself. And somewhere—a verdict on all of us: any of us ultimately reduces to what remained in other people's systems after we stop answering calls. Holloway left ten percent of the internet and two words: the love. I've seen worse results of a genius's life—and won't presume to judge this balance.