From Gimlet, this is ReplyAll, I'm PJ Vogue.

Lee Odened died of a heart attack last month.

He was 43 years old.

Everybody called Lee Q and everybody had an opinion about him, a strong one.

The one thing people could agree on is that Lee reshaped a huge part of the internet.

How producer Chloe Percinos has the story?

Stacy Odened met Q when he was 17.

He was this big, burly guy, always laughing.

But she says what most people didn't get about Q is that he was a people watcher.

You know, for such a big guy, he was just really, he could melt into the background, you

know, and he enjoyed it.

He loved being in the background and just watching, you know, how people relate and

then little chicks and everything.

He just enjoyed it.

So, you know, he always would tell me days as you could see what I saw.

He always wanted me to see what he saw.

Q was smart and ambitious, but he was trapped.

He dropped out of high school and spent a decade working a string of minimum wage jobs.

And so he decided that the way out the secret to the life he wanted was the internet.

In 1999, he buys a porn site.

It doesn't work out.

So Q tried something else, selling mixtapes online.

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