Kevin Colleran remembers that February morning clearly, the groggy feeling after a late-night flight, the snow piled on the South End sidewalks as he walked to the corner store for breakfast.
Most of all, he remembers that moment crossing Tremont Street when he spied a van turning left, directly into his path.
“I remember turning over my right shoulder and saying, ‘I’m about to get run over,’ ” Colleran said.
Knocked to the pavement, Colleran initially was able to walk away. But within an hour he was vomiting at home and quickly taken to Massachusetts General Hospital, where doctors diagnosed massive bleeding in his brain and performed emergency surgery. Another two hours, the surgeons told him, and he might have died.
The accident was a violent reminder of frailty for a young man who had enjoyed uncommon success until the moment that van swung onto Tremont Street. Hired at age 24 to be one of the first employees at Facebook, Colleran was privileged to be among the bright minds who helped to deeply embed technology into popular culture. Along the way, he became a very rich man.
Now 34, Colleran is a venture capitalist seeding the next generation of change. But he didn’t truly know how good his life had been until his near-death experience prompted an outpouring of concern and gratitude from far more people than he could have dreamed.
“If you ever go to a funeral, you look around and say, ‘How many people would be at mine?’ ” Colleran said. “My understanding was, this room would be a lot more packed than I ever imagined.”
Colleran has nearly recovered from the accident. He lost his sense of taste and smell, but has no other lasting effects from the brain injury. And on Saturday, Colleran will give the graduation speech at his alma mater, Babson College.
For the exhausted grads and proud parents in attendance, there will be no great epiphany, no storybook bolt of inspiration that forced Colleran to change bad habits or rethink his career. Instead, they will hear that life is there for the taking — a simple message made much more profound coming from a guy who nearly died just a few months ago.
“It’s a great time in my life for 100 reasons. And yes, this sucked,” Colleran said. “But I called my father, and my dad was like, ‘Don’t let this hold you down in any way.’ ”
Colleran might seem like a guy who is ripe for caricature. He pounds cans of Coke Zero, sends e-mails like they’re going out of style, and interrupts long, winding anecdotes with a smirk to note that he has trademarked the word “blabbermouth.” But in an era when fast-talking entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley excess are lampooned on television, members of Colleran’s vast network of friends are eager to testify that he is one of the most genuine, sincere, inspiring people in their lives.
“Some rich guy, the world owes me everything, poor, poor, pitiful me — he’s the exact opposite of that. He is inspired by young people, never makes them feel badly that they weren’t at Facebook, is always interested in learning about others,” said David Fialkow, a managing director at the venture capital firm General Catalyst Partners where Colleran works.
“The bottom line is,” Fialkow added, “people love Kevin Colleran — love him.”
In 2005, he was already running a successful company that sold digital ads for websites targeting college students when another group of kids ask him to build Facebook’s internal ad business. Hoping to run his own company on the side, Colleran ended up at Facebook for more than six years, long after many other early employees had cashed in and left for new adventures.
“Kevin put his heart and soul into that company as much as anyone,” said Dave Morin, another early Facebook employee who today is Colleran’s investing partner.
After leaving Facebook in 2011, Colleran traveled, got married, and eventually joined General Catalyst. Just before the accident, he, Morin, and another Facebook alum, Sam Lessin, began raising money for their own investment fund, called Slow Ventures. They were most of the way to their $40 million goal when Colleran stepped into the street that February morning.
At first Colleran was able to spring to his feet. A quick survey found no bruises, cuts, broken bones — no blood. But the ambulance crew that had warned his wife, Erica Colleran, to watch for signs of head trauma was at his house an hour later after he began vomiting, an indication he had suffered a brain injury.
Any questions about how well the chatty, jovial Colleran weathered the surgery were answered shortly after he woke up from the anesthesia.
“One of the first things that he said when we were in the recovery room was, ‘Hey guys, is this a bad time to mention that I don’t have health insurance?’ ” Erica Colleran said. “He was just being Kevin.”
Despite having a drain tube hanging from his skull, Colleran couldn’t resist posting a selfie from his hospital bed on Facebook— with the jokey headline, “Big Day.”
As soon as the image hit the Web, messages flooded in from all corners of his life: his best friends, business associates, even people he hardly knew — all wishing him well.
Others told Colleran his close call and persistently happy attitude had a deeper effect.
“People sent me notes like, ‘It took that picture to scare me enough to remind me how fragile life is. And therefore, I’m going to do the following — I’m sick of this job and I should have moved on long ago,’ or ‘I love this girl and I should have proposed long ago,’ ” Colleran said.
Though he had spent the early part of his career building a social network, the strength of those ties became far more apparent after he shared his experiences online.
“I feel like I affected more people’s lives than I ever imagined.”
He got out of the hospital five days later, his head a zig zag of staples. Meantime, back in his professional life, money poured into his new venture fund, closing at a much bigger $65 million.
“My joke is, I’m not the Make-a-Wish Foundation. This is a fund,” Colleran said.
But rather than contributing out of sympathy or pity, some investors said surviving the accident might give him newfound drive. “One person literally said, ‘I want to invest twice as much because you’ve got something to lose and hopefully, you’re going to be a better VC.’ ”
Two weeks after his surgery, Colleran elected to attend the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, a big trip for someone recovering from major surgery. But his doctors had cleared him, and Colleran planned to use the tech gathering to host one of his many dinner parties and personally thank the friends, business leaders, and investors who had supported him after the accident.
Curt Woodward can be reached at curt.woodward@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter at @curtwoodward.