Blyth Software, circa 1992–94: $2.30 to $23, the deep throat, the handler from Arkansas, and the exit negotiated in one word
A barely-public company's stock rose ten-fold on revenue produced by the one decision its CEO opposed, while the board ignored a year of fired truth-tellers. Fixing it required an operation with the structure of intelligence work: a deniable principal, a deep throat, and an operative nobody suspected because he was the CEO's own protégé. It worked — nobody died, nobody was defrauded, everyone won — and it taught Hare the lesson the architecture now enforces structurally: the people who tell the truth inside institutions need protection the institution itself will never volunteer.
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.
I arrived at Blyth Software in September, after the post-Stanford European summer, recruited by CEO Michael Minor with the public brag that I was the smartest GSB graduate in forty years — capable of single-handedly replacing the five or so executives Minor had lately fired for challenging him. The brag came true in the worst available way: as managers quit or were fired, their groups matrixed to me as Senior Director of Product Management until essentially everything reported to me. I worked 120 to 140 hours a week — as much as, or more than, Musk's storied Model 3 production hell — missed most meals, barely slept, and watched a muscular 208 pounds on a six-foot-four frame become an emaciated 159 in six months. A year of two hours a day in the gym, gone; I was very sad to see it go, which is the only complaint in the entire dictation.
First week, first meeting: David Baron — a thoughtful VP with a prodigious IQ and a growing family he could not afford to risk — sat down and said, I want to apologize for helping recruit you. Everything we told you was a lie. Omnis 7's celebrated from-scratch rewrite from Pascal to C++ was a converter run: the same code in a different costume. The class libraries were as flat as Kansas; the GUI was 97 percent Apple's frameworks wearing Blyth's badge. The installed base — loyal Mac shops running their businesses on Omnis 5 — was rebelling, because their product had been dropped for the Foster City glamour project while the developer who wrote most of the code that actually mattered sat in Suffolk. [Editorial note: the founder's name, and the Suffolk operation generally, are gaps — to be added.]
My response was the unglamorous one they teach in Berkeley's IEOR department: I pulled the entire engineering team off the 'PowerSoft killer' Minor was promoting to the press and put them on a stable point release of Omnis 5 that customers could actually run. The loyal base upgraded, maintenance revenue surged, Wall Street priced Blyth against PowerSoft comparables — and the stock went from $2.30 toward $23. Minor, asked years later what he had been telling Wall Street through the climb, gave the answer preserved verbatim in the source record: nothing but earnings and the growth of the client-server market — I have no idea why the stock is going up. I file it as evidence for a thesis this record keeps proving from new directions: Wall Street cannot value technology companies in booms or busts, because it understands revenue and believes in fairy tales about everything that produces it.
The truth-tellers kept getting fired — three executives had gone to the board and been summarily removed, and the Chairman ignored what they said, on reasoning he later gave me to my face: Minor had driven the stock up ten-fold, and he would ride that horse until he dropped. Enter Walt Smiley — wealthy Arkansas investor, principal backer of Bill Clinton's runs for governor and President, and therefore a man who could not afford the faintest scent of scandal. Smiley recruited the one person no one would suspect: the protégé. It was David Baron who told Smiley that I — the man everyone was afraid to talk to — could be trusted with the truth. For months Smiley was a kindly southern voice on the phone; in function he was a CIA handler running a deniable operation. Mission Impossible, in my summary, just without the guns and killing.
My brief was to get the management team speaking honestly to the board, and my presentation to the Chairman deployed everything the résumé had: the IEOR analysis of why the revenue surge could not sustain; the litigation-consulting years at Cornerstone defending bankers and accountants from the contingency bar that sues every sudden collapse; the fact that the entire US development team was actively interviewing with competitors and a simultaneous exodus would crater the stock; and the personal exposure of every deep-pocketed holder who had spent a year ignoring warnings — including Jon Bayless, the famous Texas venture investor, father of my own boss, who sat beside me through all of it, nodding and smiling. My recommendation to the Chairman was that he either reconsider — or retain Cornerstone Research now, for the inevitable suit. The Chairman listened. [Editorial note: the Chairman's name is a gap — to be added.]
The board installed Patrick Nettles — Caltech physics PhD, and therefore the first executive I could address in first principles rather than metaphor — as EVP/COO, reducing Minor to two direct reports and moving me out from under him. Minor's parting analysis was that I had a messiah savior complex, which I took as the subtlest available threat to make a martyr of me — subtle because Jeanne Bayless was sitting in the conference room hearing every word and the entire board now stood behind the protégé. Then the two negotiations that closed the story, each settled by Nettles in one word. Me, about to dump every share I owned into a thin market within the hour, calling so buyers could be lined up: noted. Me, asked what acceleration of my four-year options would be fair after six months' work, proposing half: done — followed, roughly four seconds later, by the internal monologue preserved verbatim in the source record: you idiot, he was authorized to vest it all.
The same afternoon Smiley first prescribed a beach, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation independently concurred: fifty pounds down since the last appointment, the doctor's verdict was quit immediately and get away from those people — keep working like this and you might actually die. So: cashless exercise, the first brokerage account this commune boy ever opened, at Charles Schwab, and $250,000 of stock sold into a thin market in about an hour without the price budging — the most nervous hour of a life to that point, comforted by two facts: he knew markets from the CUSIP tapes read while defending Goldman Sachs and Robert Freeman against Rudy Giuliani's Southern District, and as a departed employee, his selling was nobody's inside information. The stock, for the record, held up for quite a while after — Nettles had stabilized the thing the revolution saved. And by leaving quietly, everyone won: the phrase the source record uses, and means.
In the quiet after the boardroom, I worked out a next-generation architecture — three-tier and distributed against the era's two-tier fat clients (Blyth's own Omnis, PowerSoft, Gupta, PeopleSoft), informed by a bootleg of Forte's business plan then circulating the valley, but more organic, network-centric, decentralized: protocols rather than frameworks and code libraries. Two lessons attached themselves permanently. First, about Sand Hill Road: VCs who cannot sign NDAs but promise discretion are very likely lying — someone always leaks, and once one leaks they all share it — and I stayed away for a decade. Second, and structural: every institution I have entered since has contained truth-tellers who needed protection the institution would never volunteer, from Blyth's fired executives to the offshore crews whose minor incidents nobody wanted recorded. The architecture's answer — attribution, provenance, and governance that cannot be stripped by whoever holds the org chart — is the immaculate revolution generalized: a system where telling the truth is structurally safe, so it never again requires a handler from Arkansas. Then, on doctor's orders and Smiley's, I went to the tropics — and the round-the-world trip with Tullan Holmqvist that followed is where, in India, the grand vision was born. That story is promised, and Origins is holding its place.
A stock up ten-fold for reasons its CEO couldn't name, a board that shot the messengers, and a fix that required tradecraft: a deniable backer, a deep throat with everything to lose, and the one operative above suspicion. It ended with two one-word answers, a fifty-pound invoice paid in muscle, and half the options — asked for by an idiot, in the idiot's own contemporaneous assessment. Nobody was defrauded and everyone won, which is rarer than either. The architecture is what you build when you decide truth-telling should never again need a coup.
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.
Omnis — the only client-server tool that worked across everything
Open →In the graphArkansas investor, principal Clinton backer, and the kindly southern voice running the operation — deniable by design
Open →In the graphBoss, braggart, and the husband of Hare's mentor. This page is Hare's account of a thirty-year-old conflict, marked as such throughout, and Minor's own account is invited.
Open →In the graphCaltech physics PhD installed as EVP/COO by the board; the first executive Hare could talk to in first principles
Open →In the graphThe deep throat: a prodigious IQ, a growing family he couldn't risk, and the confession that started the revolution
Open →In the graphBlyth Software — and a connection between two parts of the record
Open →In the graphExpert testimony, and where arguments learn to survive attack
Open →In the graph“Imaginary engineers” — third floor, Etcheverry Hall
Open →In the graphA mainframe company turned client-server, and sold for a 500% year
Open →In the graphHarvard then Stanford, Tesseract, Benchmark — and a game of chicken with a city bus
Open →In the graphOne of Hare's closest friends and mentors; VP of Sales to Hare's Director of Product Management; the Bix's lunches
Open →In the graphHer mother read tarot and believed in everything; she loved Hare for accepting her family exactly as they were; she hugged him through the whole announcement
Open →In the graph1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →The account this was distilled from, preserved as dictated — verbatim and immutable.
Read the source →In his own words · S-071The account this was distilled from, preserved as dictated — verbatim and immutable.
Read the source →In his own words · S-155The account this was distilled from, preserved as dictated — verbatim and immutable.
Read the source →The record and the architecture are not separate arguments. Each of these mechanisms exists because of something in this episode, and each is what the episode turned out to require.
The episode is the story. The explainers are the mechanism — what problem it solves, how, and where it would fail.
The mechanism in full, with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Quantum RecognitionThe mechanism in full, with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Consilient Innovators NetworkThe mechanism in full, with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →These are specific and addressed to named people. If you are one of them, or know one, a single reply closes an item that has been open for twenty-five years.
Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io. A timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record — and the correction is published with your name on it.
Answer a question →