In this personal talk, Alexandra Zatarain recounts how her father's cancer diagnosis and his final email—"You build the road by moving along. Never give up"—became the catalyst for a major life change. After his death, she accessed his old Hotmail account, discovering a series of heartfelt messages that revealed his resilience and gratitude during his last days. The most impactful line inspired her to leave her comfortable job in New York, move to San Francisco, and join three Italian co‑founders to launch Eight Sleep, a sleep‑technology startup. Zatarain reflects on the emotional weight of reading a deceased loved one’s digital correspondence, the guilt of distance, and the broader lesson that seemingly small words can spark bold risks. She urges the audience to stay close to inspiring people, heed their cues, and recognize that digital words can have lasting, transformative power.
Chapters
I'm Alex, or Alexandra, and I'm going to talk tonight about taking risks and an experience that inspired me to do so many years ago. So I'm going to try not to cry, but maybe I'll cry and it'll be fine. 4 years ago, my father, who was, I don't know, 65 years old or something, got diagnosed with cancer. So we're all together for Thanksgiving. We get the news, and 4 months later he was gone. So we're not gonna talk about that sad story, but something that at the time I didn't think would really impact my life, and inspire me to make a change, ended up doing so. A few weeks after my dad passed away, my mom asked me if I could help her with something. So she said that before my dad died, he left a business transaction pending, so someone would owe him money if the transaction went ahead, and that she would receive the money if, you know, that came to fruition. And so she wanted me to find this John Doe and make sure that he stuck to his word. So I'm like, okay, well, I don't know this John Doe. I think I met him once, like, a few months ago when I was visiting my dad while he was sick, but I'll figure out a way to get in touch with him. So I remembered that many years before my siblings and I had helped my dad to create his first ever email account. So we decided on Hotmail.com because it was very hot at the time, and we created a password that all of us could remember because we were sure my dad would want to access the account from our computers and then he wouldn't remember the password. So we settled on something easy, and I was sure all these years later, maybe like 13 or 15 years later, that there was a very slim chance that he had changed the password. So I open my computer, I put in hotmail.com, I hadn't been there in a very long time, put in the credentials, access. First try, I was inside his email, right? It's kind of creepy, you know, it's the email of a deceased person, you don't know what you're gonna find, but it's not a story about that. So I find this like tens of emails of like Facebook asking him to come back and find what his friends are up to, and LinkedIn telling him about the friends that got the new job, and Dropbox Dropbox being like you have a new file or something. I'm like, this is weird. So I have to find John Doe, right? That's what I'm in there for. I search his name, I find him, and I start typing a message from my dad's account, 'cause I figured that's how he's gonna open it, 'cause he's like, oh shit, who's writing to me right now? I hit send, and then I'm just waiting. Maybe he'll reply pretty quickly, I'll just leave the window open. I'm waiting. Have you ever found someone else's email or Facebook open in your computers? Anyone? What do you do? Do you just, like, close it? I mean, at this point, I'm like, maybe I should clean up those Facebook messages. You know, you never know. Maybe it'll just, like, get super full over the next years, and they'll just close his email. So I started cleaning them up, delete all those spammy messages, and then his last messages just rise to the top. I'm like, oh, there it is. That's the very last message he responded to. February 14, 2014. This is like 8 days before he was admitted to the hospital to never return home. So I'm like, wow, look at my dad. He was still going at it. It was a business message. I didn't realize what he had been through those days because I live almost 3,000 miles away from home. I grew up in Tijuana, Mexico. So that's really far. I didn't get to experience the last days with him or my family, get an idea of what it was like, what was he doing during the day while he was like sick and not feeling well. Well, he was still working, which is amazing, very inspiring. I'm like, "What was he writing?" Open the email. This email was to a business acquaintance, but my dad was super friendly. He would call him like a very dear friend. I knew who the guy was. He spent 2 lines talking about this like business deal or something, and then he changed the topic abruptly, and he wrote, "Topic: my health. I'm in this fight. The good news is I have great care, from my wife, my son, my sister, and a nurse friend who can occasionally tend to me when I'm not feeling well. I started crying. I was like, holy shit, like, he was expressing something in such few words, and I don't think he ever really shared that with us. I don't think he really told us how he felt about the care he was receiving, or how grateful he was about it, or how positive he was about things. Even just 8 days before he was readmitted to the hospital. He passed away like 12 days after that message. He probably didn't expect his life to end so soon, and none of us do really. So it really shook me. I was like, I think I missed a huge chunk of what happened to him and my family by being so far away. So I kept going. I kept reading the messages. I figured this is the best way I have to understand what happened. So I keep scrolling and I find more business messages, messages from family members, like sending him articles about the latest miraculous cancer cures, and emails with— to me and my sister who don't live close to home. I couldn't stop. It was just like this window into his heart, what he was feeling. The deepest messages were the ones who were his friends of faith, people that were really supporting him with faith in these hard moments. And they were the toughest because he would share how scared he was. And he said he was scared of being alone. And I felt so guilty. I'm like, I'm so far away, he feels alone? Like, what's going on, right? But then I read a message that really inspired me. It was a message to my sister. And he wrote something that just completely changed the course of my life. He wrote to her in a really short email, "You build the road by moving along. Never give up." 4 months after that, I moved from New York City to San Francisco, left my comfortable job, and joined other 3 Italian co-founders— figure that, the Mexican and 3 Italians— to start a sleep technology company. No one thought we would be here. No one thought that what we were doing was viable business, that we could survive, that we could get anywhere, that no one would fund these people, foreigners with accents, like, who are you? And here we are. Building the road as we move along and not giving up. And that's what I hope that all of you get out of this, is something in your life will inspire you one day to do whatever you want to do. Maybe it's start a company, maybe it's write a book, maybe it's run for a class president, or like work at a nonprofit, or switch from teaching to like being a media producer. You never know. Just stay close to the people that inspire you the most, and really watch out for their cues and their words, and care for your words, because they can be in cyberspace forever, and you never know who they're going to inspire. Thank you.
