I was stunned and saddened to hear of the passing of my friend and former colleague Wayne Pasternack.

Wayne and I overlapped at Bloomberg for two decades. He was the consummate salesman and a source of infectious optimism.

He invited me to join him visiting clients on a number of occasions including one trip that was particularly memorable. It was 2013 and we went to visit clients in the Pennsylvania countryside outside Philadelphia.

I spent ten hours watching Wayne drive from office to office to visit client after client. Before that I never understood the grind of being in sales.

Wayne had extensive product knowledge, of course, but what made him stand out was his warmth and personal interest in clients. He knew what they did and where they worked before. He knew their birthdays and kids’ names.

And he delivered that personal touch while managing to meet some pretty crazy requirements of how many meetings and calls sales people had to make every day.

Something else stood out about that particular day: while we were riding in the car between meetings very little time was spent talking shop.

Instead, Wayne spent the day telling me how proud he was of his kids.

He told me that his older son was finishing up at the University of Pennsylvania and that he hoped to write comedy for a living. He had interned at the Jon Stewart show. While a student, he produced a video series called Up and Down with Sam Pasternack in which he interviewed other students while riding up and down an elevator in the tallest building on campus.

Wayne said his younger son Jesse was a film buff who was so knowledgeable about the silent pictures of the 1920s that he was invited by filmmaker Michael Moore to host a panel debate during Moore’s annual film festival in Transverse City, Michigan.

It’s a testament to Wayne’s passion about his family that I remember those details more than a decade later.

I heard of Wayne’s passing when his son Sam Pasternack posted on LinkedIn. It triggered an outpouring of comments from former colleagues who remembered him fondly.

One of the things Wayne did at Bloomberg every morning was re-record his voice mail to add the date, weather and tidbits of personal news. It was a wonderful personal touch.

Sarah Yango O’Brien, another former colleague, told me that years after both she and Wayne had left Bloomberg he would reach out to send her sales prospects. He was just being helpful.

Who would do that?

Wayne would.

He was kind, thoughtful and generous.

He will be sorely missed by so many.

#cancersucks