I wouldn't call him a friend, you could even say we disliked each other, we certainly clashed enough as moderators and there was a large amount of drama when I banned him from /r/TheoryOfReddit. However, I respected him as a moderator and I certainly didn't think he deserved to have his life ruined like that over his online activities.
He was very helpful in the mod community, he was a moderator of /r/modhelp I believe, and he also created a new moderator guide that was very educational. He personally inspired me to become a moderator. Even though I wasn't really into the NSFW side of reddit (although I once created a few successful ones just to see if I could), studying his posting history showed me that it really wasn't that hard to just dive into creating new subreddits. All you had to do was seed them with content and start talking about them & linking to them in other subreddits.Were you friends with VA?