Cornerstone Research, 1987–1990
A résumé sorted into the wrong stack put a twenty-two-year-old into a fourteen-person litigation consulting firm whose expert witnesses were Nobel laureates. Almost everything downstream follows from it.
A clerical error put Hare, at twenty-two, into a fourteen-person firm whose expert witnesses were Nobel laureates.
Two things came out of it that run through everything since. The adversarial habit — every claim stated with the condition that would defeat it — was learned building expert testimony designed to survive cross-examination, and it is the register the entire corpus is written in. And the relationships: Mark Wolfson and Myron Scholes, met there in the late eighties, were partners at Oak Hill thirteen years later when it funded and then took Consilient.
The corpus is written in a specific register — every claim stated with the condition that would defeat it. That habit was learned constructing expert testimony designed to survive cross-examination, and the relationships formed here are the ones that funded and later ended Consilient thirteen years on.
The single most consequential thing in this record happened because a résumé was sorted into the wrong stack. Everything downstream — the adversarial habit of mind the entire corpus is written in, the Stanford admission, the relationships that would fund and then end Consilient thirteen years later — follows from a clerical accident.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
He was applying to management consulting and got sorted into litigation consulting by mistake.
He took the job deliberately: earn a recommendation from Scholes, use it to reach Stanford, and stop being afraid of the law by understanding it.
He contradicted Scholes in front of the whole firm at twenty-two, and was right — which is how the relationship started.
The adversarial discipline the whole corpus is written in comes from here.
He graduated from Berkeley in December 1987 and was applying to management consulting firms, and took a job at Strategic Planning Associates because he wanted to live in Washington near his grandmother. His only prior encounter with New York had been a paid recruiting trip to Morgan Stanley, who wanted to put him in the IT department. He wanted to do money, so he declined.
At the MAC Group his résumé went into the wrong pile. They read him as applying to MAC Research — the litigation consulting practice, which needed heavy quantitative analysis and therefore recruited the same profile. He went down there anyway.
The house description was blunt: we keep rich white guys out of jail. This was the era of Ivan Boesky and insider trading prosecutions, and the practice was extremely lucrative — lucrative enough that under a compensation model tying ownership to excess revenue generated, it would have come to own the parent firm. So it was spun out. It became Cornerstone Research.
That is the same observation this record keeps making about incentive structures: the design determined the organisational outcome, and nobody had to intend it.
Fourteen people when he arrived. He was hired by Cindy Zollinger and Jim Malernee, two of the founders — Zollinger would go on to run the firm as president and chief executive from 2007 to 2014.
The recruiting pitch was the expert roster. Myron Scholes was the best known; Gary Becker was there; the operating principle was that the experts either had a Nobel Prize or were on their way to one. A small firm working only at the very high end of financial litigation.
He started in January 1988, a month after graduating, and had two and a half years before business school. He made it explicit to himself: work here, earn a recommendation from Scholes, and that gets me into Stanford. Plus he would learn law and finance from the best people alive at it.
The reasoning underneath was not careerism. He had concluded that you are afraid of whatever you do not understand, expected the law to matter enormously, and took the job to stop being afraid of it. He had also worked out that analyst work was grunt work and an MBA was required for a real career — and that Stanford was harder to enter than Harvard, taking around 335 students a year against 1,000 or more.
I read Cox and Rubinstein — the standard options handbook — cover to cover on joining. (I had assumed for years that it was a Scholes text; checking my own recollection, it was Cox and Rubinstein. The correction is recorded rather than quietly fixed.)
Then a firm-wide meeting: Scholes at the head of the table in the main conference room, everyone arrayed around him. He was preparing a case and enjoying the soapbox, and the room was bowing down.
I was twenty-two, and I contradicted him.
Across the table, the associate assigned to watch over me appeared to be nodding. She was in fact trying to kick me under the table, and was too short to reach.
Scholes said I was right. Possibly with a note about having been simplifying for the room. It was the first time anyone had contradicted him in decades. That is how the relationship began.
The clerical error put him in a room where being right in public mattered more than being deferential, and where the people at the table were the ones whose results he would spend thirty years extending. He did not stumble into the relationships — he engineered proximity at twenty-two and then earned the rest by not backing down. The adversarial discipline the whole corpus is written in, with a defeating condition attached to every claim, was learned building expert testimony designed to survive cross-examination.
Episodes are building blocks. The same material appears in more than one where it belongs in more than one, and every claim traces back to a primary source.
The closest of Hare's Nobel-laureate mentorships — thirteen years, from a contradicted lecture to an investment in Consilient
Open →In the graphExpert testimony, and where arguments learn to survive attack
Open →In the graphVice Chairman of Consilient, and the introduction into Cisco
Open →In the graph1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →In the graphThree rounds, a silver bullet, and the end of Hare's tenure
Open →