Dying Το Succeed

When Zeb Evans was 10, he almost died, and it inspired him to become an entrepreneur. Then he almost died again and again-and each time emerged a radically different founder. And in that, he's not alone.

- By Paul Kix

He was Jet-Skiing with his family near a friend's lakeside home in North Carolina, when he went to dock the craft and came in too fast. Young Zeb hit the dock and flew off the Jet Ski and somersaulted in the air, landing on the side of his stomach on an adjacent dock's hard metal ramp. The impact sliced open his obliques, and Evans blacked out. His parents rushed him to a nearby hospital, where doctors stitched him up and kept him for observation. On his second night in the hospital, "I had crazy pain," Evans says today, "like a knife going through my whole body." The doctors thought the pain stemmed from the newly formed scar tissue on his abdomen. Then he started vomiting. He couldn't eat anything. Within days, Evans couldn't summon the strength to walk.

By the time a pediatric specialist realized Evans was suffering not just from the stomach injury but also a ruptured appendix, which was draining pus into his body and blood, his condition had deteriorated so much that doctors feared he would die if they waited even a day to operate. After the appendectomy, the doctors refused to sew Evans back up. The poison pus had to seep out first, through his exposed gut.

For two months, he lived with two tubes stuffed into his midsection. Every few hours, nurses would rip the gauze from his sticky wound, clean the site with alcohol, and press a new layer of gauze down. The pain of that, the indignity of the catheter, the unceasing hunger from his inability to eat-he couldn't help but feel angry, couldn't help wallowing in self-pity. But he also learned something he'd never forget about the fragility of life, how even a healthy 10-year-old kid could nearly die and then take two months to struggle to live again.