Just heard that Martin Schaedel, a very interesting, cheerful and attaching guy, died in a plane crash in Santa Monica yesterday.
Martin was a modern incarnation of the concept of “international man of mystery”. He was always in or out of airplanes, always traveling to exotic places and always happy to meet new people. You could spend hours building conceptual business plans and doing small talks. Time usually flew with him.
He was also very curious and enthusiastic. And always pushing people to get to meet together. I’ve never met somebody who was such an incarnation of the 7 degrees theory…
Anyway, so long Martin… You’ll be truly missed…
More info there http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-planecrash29-2009jan29,0,2393886.story
Also see the post from Fred Wilson there and the Twitter storm here.
french founder in ny 
That’s shocking. I just met Martin a couple months ago for the first time. This is a really sad incident. My condolences to his family and friends.