Seventeen years of Doug Curling, and the thirty-six minutes I couldn't listen to
Doug Curling died in July 2026. He was a friend of my parents before he was anything to me, and then he was my mentor for seventeen years and the lead investor in my company.
On 5 November 2009 I sent Doug Curling an email asking for forty-five minutes of his time. I was three weeks from finishing an MBA in Rotterdam, I had a paper to write about how leaders make decisions, and I needed to interview one.
He replied "sure" in under four hours, with three windows to choose from. We spoke on the Monday at 3pm, and he gave me thirty-six minutes.
I recorded it so I wouldn't have to take notes, and I have spent the weeks since he died trying to make myself play it.
The reason is that I am plainly not listening. You can hear it. I read my professor's definitions out loud, badly. I ask a question and then talk over the start of the answer. Twice I say "that made sense" about something I clearly hadn't processed. At one point Doug has to ask me to repeat a question because I've mangled it.
But here is what I found in my sent folder this week, dated the following morning:
"It is inspiring, listening to you take my jumbled questions and turn them into an answer that explained to me what I was trying to ask."
So I did know. Twenty-seven-year-old me listened to the tape again that night, understood exactly what had happened, wrote it down, and then spent the next seventeen years with his words ringing in my head.
That same email asked whether I could share the recording with my five-person study group. He wrote back:
"Glad to help -- sure you can share the interview. All my best. Finish strong. DC"
Which is almost word for word how the recording itself ends: "Any time, pal. Glad to help. All my best." He wrote what he said. I would receive some version of that sentence for the rest of his life.
The thing he was best at
Eight minutes into the tape, explaining that companies have to know what they're bad at, he says:
"My company wasn't great at de novo startup ideas. We were much better at taking something somebody got going and then commercializing it."
He was describing ChoicePoint, where he was President and COO, and which completed 34 acquisitions on his watch while revenue went from $430 million to a billion.
Then he did it to me. On 6 January 2011, at 2:14 in the morning, I emailed him asking if he'd have lunch with me and Adam Wilson to look at an idea we were calling People Traffic, a way of knowing how many people were actually at a place or an event. He replied at 2:38am: "At 11:45 yes. DC"
Nine days later, at 6am on a Saturday, unprompted and with no stake in any of it, he sent us a full page on why our plan wouldn't work. Nobody sold smartphone location data at the accuracy we needed. Cell-tower aggregation was worth looking at. Foursquare check-ins were a badly biased sample. Multi-storey venues broke the whole model. Then, when we told him we had a prototype coming: "Great. Go Get Em ! DC", followed two minutes later by a second email he'd clearly thought of on the way out the door, telling us to index the event data so each rebuild didn't start from scratch.
That became Hugecity. He led the round, and we sold it to Time Out in 2014, which permanently changed the shape of my career. He never had the idea. He made it bigger. He had described his own gift to me on a phone call two years earlier and I hadn't noticed.
He always answered
March 2009, choosing an MBA concentration, 10:02pm to 11:22pm: "Either Finance or Strategy. Depends on what you want to do. I'd choose the one that looks like it has the most interesting classes :). DC"
March 2017, a job offer with stock options I didn't understand, answered overnight, in three sentences, ending "Congrats! DC"
October 2025, when I told him I'd been asked to move my family to Helsinki for a pay cut, two hours, and worth quoting in full because it is the most Doug thing in my inbox:
":) The euro is way up against the $ culture/mayhem/dumbfuckery wise -- and in your shoes getting the fuck out of here for a while would be very high on my list. But culture change will hit the home/school more than the office so mama's gotta be happy. We can set up a call anytime tomorrow. Just let me know. Congrats. Options are good. cheers. DC"
Options are good. On the call the next day came the line I have used more than anything else he ever gave me: why would you blow up your family financially? Never "don't." Always "make sure the floor holds." I have negotiated three roles with that question in my head and it has made every one of them better.
In July this year I wrote to him with two things in the same email. That I'd heard he was going into major surgery. And that the plan had worked, we were moving to London, and I'd be taking over enterprise restaurants for both Deliveroo and Wolt. I told him I'd used his question in every round of the negotiation, and that his advice had been pivotal at Georgia Tech, at Erasmus, at Hugecity, at Time Out, at Citilabs and now here.
He answered:
"Love it when a plan comes together. Thrilled for you and the family. Welcome home Hugh :). I'm getting better every day. Need a stent but no bypass. Down to 179 lbs so need to add some weight back on. Slow climb out :). We'll come see you in London. Applause. DC"
Welcome home. My parents are English. Doug knew them before he knew me, and he had been watching me work my way around the world for two decades, so when I told him we were moving to London he did not congratulate me on a relocation. He told me I was going back to where my family came from. It is four words and it contains the entire length of the friendship.
He mentioned a stent and fifteen lost pounds in the same breath as applause, with a smiley on either side of it, and it read like a man on the mend.
I never wrote back.
That is the last email in seventeen years of them, and it is his. He answered everything I ever sent him, usually within hours, often within minutes. The one time it was my turn, when the only thing required of me was to say I can't wait to have you here, I left it sitting in my inbox. He died later that month.
It was never about me
In May 2025 I introduced him to Khari Cain, a Grammy-winning producer building a live studio platform in Atlanta. Doug had met him once. That evening he sent Khari twelve questions, including:
"RU building a new product, making a necessary enhancement to an existing product, or just reselling/recycling content otherwise not monetized? (Motives matter)"
"What part of your new idea is the easiest for you to abandon in a trade off for something else?"
"Where can this damage the mothership and how do I protect my 'base'?"
He signed off: "I'll be smarter soon. Hoist all." Then he went home and watched the Netflix documentary about Khari's daughter, and wrote again at one in the morning: "Damn dude… The Dad (and granddad) in me is humbled by all you and your family have found and built."
Fourteen months before he died, decades past having anything to prove, he was still doing for a stranger exactly what he had done for a student with a fluffy assignment in 2009. Asking better questions than the person had thought to ask themselves, and answering fast.
Everybody got the same thing
Since he died, hundreds of people have been posting what he meant to them, and it has been a strange and humbling thing to read. His emails to me weren't special. They were just Doug.
Someone remembered the slap on the shoulder and "go get em kid", the exact phrase, exclamation mark and all, that he sent me in January 2011. Someone he led at ChoicePoint remembered him saying "just work the plan" when things were going badly, which is what he spends four minutes explaining on the tape: agree a plan, then get out of the way. And his son Matt has said plainly that the brewery he built in Roswell would not exist without his father. The same trick, run on his own kid.
Whatever I thought was between me and Doug turns out to have been the standard service. He simply did this. For a student, for a producer he'd met once, for a mayoral candidate, for his son, for hundreds of people in one Georgia town, for seventeen years, fast, at 2am, at 6am on a Saturday, until the July he ran out of time.
There is one more thing. In 2018 he gave a talk at a school for children who learn differently, where he sat on the board because his own kids had struggled to feel successful. He mentions in passing that his whole family is as scrambled as he is on attention span. In another talk, eight months before he called me, he says he had ADD long before it was fashionable. He built his working life around it. He blocked out half of every week so nobody could put a meeting in it. He read fast and he listened slowly, and he said so on my tape too, at twenty-six minutes: people who talk really slowly make him crazy, and he rationed his time with them.
I talk slowly. I have always talked slowly. He gave me thirty-six minutes on the phone, which was the medium he liked least, and then seventeen more years of them.
The invitation
After he died I wrote to his family. His daughter Ashley wrote back:
"Dad told me recently about your success and how proud he was of you for your new position. He was very touched that you sought his advice and was thrilled for you."
He had told his daughter about it. And there is a clause in there I have not been able to put down since. He was very touched that you sought his advice.
For seventeen years I thought I was the one doing the taking. The student with the fluffy assignment, the founder emailing at two in the morning, the guy who kept turning up with one more question and a cheap recording device. It never once occurred to me that being asked was the part he valued. That the asking wasn't the price of the relationship. It was the relationship.
That is the one thing of his I never heard. I heard all the rest of it, quoted it, built a career on it. But it never once landed that the asking was something I was giving him rather than something I was taking. Ask the person. They are almost never as burdened by it as you fear, and sometimes, years later, they are telling their daughter about it.
I don't get to send the email I owe him. So I'll do this instead. Donna, Michael, Ashley, Matt, and the grandkids: we'll come see you in London was the last thing he said to me, and I never got to answer it, so I am answering it now. The offer stands and it does not expire. Any of you, all of you, whenever you like, for as long as you like. There is a room, there is a city he wanted to see, and I will take the week off.
The recording is here. Thirty-six minutes, a 2009 phone line, and he swears throughout, which is accurate. My questions are bad. His answers are not. He gave me permission to share it in 2009, and I am finally taking him up on it.
Hoist.