An entrepreneur who founded one of the world’s most popular websites was mysteriously found dead in his university office just hours after sending an email claiming officials at the school were trying to sabotage him.
Marshall Brian II, 63, an educator and founder of HowStuffWorks, was found dead in his office at North Carolina State University at around 7am on November 20, after his wife, Leigh Ann, called for a welfare check, according to the Technician, the university’s student-run newspaper.
Authorities have not yet released a cause of death.
But just a few hours before, at around 4.30am, Brian sent an email to colleagues at the school saying two university department heads retaliated against him after he filed a number of ethics complaints.
‘If you are receiving this email, you are a friend and colleague of mine,’ he wrote, the News & Observer reports. ‘Today, I would like to ask for a few minutes of your time so that I can tell you a story.’
Brian went on to claim that he was not actually planning to retire, as Stephen Markham, the executive director of NC State Innovation and Entrepreneurship, insinuated in a November 6 internal email.
‘I have just been through one of the most demoralizing, depressing, humiliating, unjust processes possible with the University,’ the beloved professor wrote.
‘The fact is that I am not “retiring.” Instead, NC State terminated me on October 29.’
He wrote that after he submitted ethics complaints about Veena Misra, the head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and brought his concerns to her directly, Misra retaliated against him.
Brian’s email contained allegations that Misra engaged in wrongdoing such as lies, incompetence, hiding information, bad faith and unethical behavior following a disagreement in August about repurposing the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program meeting space to accommodate a new hire, the Technician reports.
‘What came back was a sickening nuclear bomb of retaliation, the likes of which could not be believed,’ the professor continued.
‘[Misra] ex-communicated me from my department for reporting my concerns to her.’
He said he received an email a few weeks after submitting his ethics complaints from Srinath Ekkad, the head of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, saying the department would no longer recommend students participate in his Engineering Entrepreneurs Program.
When he then responded to Ekkad, Brian claimed that Markham informed him he would be taking disciplinary action against him for ‘unacceptable behavior.’
Brian continued to say he believed the university’s ethics complaint system’s framework was not being properly used to address his concerns.
His former student, Brandon Kashani, who was one of the recipients of the email, noted he had submitted numerous complaints through the university’s EthicsPoint system, and claimed the tensions in the department arose because Brian didn’t ‘play the political game.’
‘Marshall was caught in an imbalanced group of people with more power than him and they didn’t like him calling them out,’ Kashani told the student newspaper.
‘…He was keeping people accountable. He didn’t understand that political aspect of it and they just wanted to get rid of him.’
Kevin Barry, another alumnae of Brian’s program who now serves as a member of the Board of Advisors for NC State’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Leadership program, also said his former professor was pivotal in the lives of many students throughout the years.
‘Marshall was a cornerstone of entrepreneurship at NC State, and a very key person who dedicated himself and was a real entrepreneur, and really dedicated himself to the students,’ he said.
‘And he, through and through, down to the bone, had the love and desire to help students.
‘So to see what’s going on with him is just absolutely devastating and disgusting.’
Brian was born in Santa Monica, California, and was heavily influenced as a child by his father’s work designing components for NASA’s lunar lander and his later development of Atlanta’s MARTA system, according to an online obituary.
He earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and later a Master of Science in Computer Science from NC State, where he first met Leigh Ann.
The two would go on to raise four children together, David, Irena, Jonny and Ian, and Brian took a position as a computer science professor.
He worked in that position up until 1992, when he founded a software company called Interface Technologies, after finding success creating a website with his wife on which he posted easy-to-understand scientific explanations about how basic gadgets functioned.
Early entries on HowStuffWorks.com included research on VCRs, airplanes and car engines, and it soon became one of the 1,000-most visited websites in the world, the News & Observer reports.
It grew to 10,000 visitors a day in 1998, and then to 33,000 by early 2000.
‘People get on the site and they can finally understand the technology all around them,’ he told the newspaper in 1999.
‘And they can realize that it’s fairly simple at its core,’ he said, adding that it is ‘pretty comforting and reassuring to know that they can understand it all.’
By the early 2000s, HowStuffWorks became a major brand with 20 employees, and it started publishing a free Stuff Works magazine that was sent to 10,000 schools.
Brian ultimately sold his company in 2002 to the investment firm Convex Group, and five years later, Discovery Communications bought it for $250million.
In the years that followed, Brian continued to work in education media, producing a series for The National Geographic Channel called Factory Floor, which showed behind-the-scenes manufacturing of everyday items, and appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006 to explain how television worked.
He also authored more than a dozen books and contributed articles to the News & Observer on a range of topics like dividends and humidifiers.
But in 2012, Brian returned to NC State, where he helped students launch startups.
‘Anytime I had an issue, he would sit down with me for hours and just write, write, write in his iPad,’ Kashani recounted.
‘Then he would go home and at night send me an email with a million suggestions and scenarios and different things when he had time to digest it.’
Barry, who founded the startup FilterEasy as an undergraduate, also said a lot of people thought his business was a ‘cool idea.
‘But Marshall is one of the people who would dive in and ask you every question and every problem and help you work towards solutions.’
In his personal life, the obituary says, Brian ‘would do anything for his family, including building a duck pond with an excavator because his future wife said she wanted ducks, or jumping in the car to drive hours to deliver a set of keys to his daughter who had left them at home.’
He also dreamed of one day building his own helicopter, and often spoke about walking down the Appalachian Trail.
‘Through his work, teaching and boundless curiosity, Marshall touched countless lives, inspiring others to explore, learn and better understand the world around them,’ the obituary says.
‘He will be greatly missed, but will live on in the hearts and minds of all who knew him.’
DailyMail.com has reached out to North Carolina State University for comment.
