Check it oooooout

ONE of my favorite ledes in Discovery Times:

After September 11, 2001, David Heydon was a dreamer in need of a dream, an entrepreneur in search of an enterprise. A native of Brisbane, Australia, he had transplanted himself to New York during the dot-com boom and had tried to flog a new kind of customer-relations software to airlines—an idea that did not survive the post-9/11 travel slump. Heydon slunk back to Brisbane. There he reconnected with Julian Malnic, an old friend from his student days at the University of New South Wales, and unexpectedly found himself on a whole new path.

This comes from a story titled: Can Giant Robots Successfully Mine the Mile-Deep Seafloor?

I like this lede because, it is at the same time informative and really quite separate from what the story is actually about. So in a sense, it really does "lead" up to a story about a man who really is just looking for an opportunity. And it is interesting that the lede switches off, just like the mans life does; it takes a whole new spin. At one moment he's pursuing dot-comes the next he's got $266 million dollars in a mining company, building a boat to tap mineral resources a mile into the deep blue.