Victor H. Shear – In Memoriam

Visionary entrepreneur, revolutionary inventor, and silent humanist with unbounded kindness

Eulogies of a great man should be easy to write, but when they are for a very close friend and mentor, whose life was suddenly cut short, and when they are for someone with whom you’ve had regular, intense intellectual conversations, establishing more than ever that his mind was still brilliant and prolific, they are crushingly hard to write.

Victor Shear lived life on his own terms. He never compromised. He loved people but also valued his own company, living the life of a monastic samurai, often retreating to the forest to meditate on the state of the world and how he could improve it. But when he chose to, he emerged from the forest with great epiphanies and fundamental contributions. He lived and died on his own terms and did not, as many do, suffer a long and steady decline. It is tragic that he died amid an amazing new burst of invention, having so much more to offer us.

Victor Shear lived in his mind, playing with deep ideas like a master juggler with flaming torches. His contributions to computer science and the Internet are profound, and his inventions live in every Internet device on earth. Flying back to the east coast after our first encounter with Victor, my colleague, a great computer scientist himself, leaned over from the seat behind me and asked what I thought. I responded, “I didn’t understand a word he said, but I’m overwhelmed by a sense that this is the right thing to do.” That was Victor Shear – a man who spoke in 64 dimensions to people who lived in the penury of three, who could imbue people with a sense that his mission was world-changing and inspire them to join him on his fantastic journey.

In the mid-1980s, Victor realized that computers were shrinking from mainframes to minis to PCs and that they were talking to each other over open networks. As a sociologist by training, a contrarian by nature, and a self-taught computer scientist, he realized that the Internet Protocol was not built for trust, and without trust, the Internet would never succeed. From there came Intertrust, a great company bolstered by a profound patent portfolio, a team he built by hand, collecting great minds from all walks of business and science, and drawing in money from noble institutions with tremendous patience. Victor’s life was many battles fought in a personal war against digital chaos. He foresaw the IoT, warned of malware before it was called that, warned of nations fighting cyberwars, and even warned of pandemics that would send us all to our hiding places – and he created an architecture for secure distributed computing that could protect from threats while enabling a vast digital economic medium: he was a tremendous visionary.

Today, his many inventions live at the heart of every major operating system on the planet, and to the extent there is a thin blue line that separates us from digital chaos, we have Victor Shear to thank for that. Since leaving Intertrust in 2003, he started a new company, Advanced Elemental Technologies, which has pioneered a new field of mutual authentication that will surely advance security on the net even more. While the foundation has been laid, there is far more to do, some in the bits and bytes that sew the Internet together, much in the way we behave as humans.

The greatness of Victor’s genius came from a deep-seated understanding of how humans interact with each other; something most technologists and scientists lack. The latter operate from the cold hard corners of mathematics and physics, often with an autistic lack of empathy for humanity, which is why the amount of misery that comes from innovation often matches the amount of joy. But a humanist inventor, a man focused on bettering the human condition by using words like “trust” instead of “security,” is a rare particle. His approach to seeing technology through the way people and institutions would use it, not the other way around, was a superpower that gave him a unique view. Victor always admonished us from talking about walls, locks, and gates. He saw inclusion where most saw exclusion, and he believed that by treating people and machines contextually, one could create a “civil digital society.”

The greatest contribution a person can make to the planet is to leave it slightly better than when they found it, and Victor Shear has done so more than most would ever dream of. Yet possibly his greatest contributions may lie in the love and warmth he engendered in those he cared about. Victor was a man with many acquaintances and very few friends. Yet his sense of mission moved from the macro to the micro with everyone he knew. He made many wealthy, in mind and in matter. He took care of the weak with unbounded generosity and touched people with a sense of hope and caring. And he did it with honesty and dignity and assiduous attention to detail. Throughout his 77 years, he comported himself with profound depth and dignity, and the innocence of a creative child, with a view of his fellow humans that focused on finding the good in everyone. A creator with tremendous gifts that he chose to share with those he touched.

Victor Shear will be sorely missed but will come back to life with every movie streamed, every song downloaded, every app protected, and eventually with an Internet wired around the trust of a true civil digital society.

Talal G. Shamoon

Berkeley, CA