1995–2000: knowing the entire KPCB partnership — and the daily ritual that kept a founder sharp, in Hare's telling (S-101).
A founder in the full orbit of the Valley's most powerful venture partnership — the friendships, the ritual, and the filing discipline that protected the architecture before a single pitch. Vignettes 3–4 of the S-101 compilation, near-verbatim.
Because the record's later filing discipline — the provisional-before-the-pitch reflex that protected every architecture since — was learned here, in the orbit of the financiers it protected against.
Hare knew the whole Kleiner partnership from 1995 — Lacroute via Gassée over PDP-8s and Chateau Margaux — and ran on a legal speedball of Bordeaux and double lattes.
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 came to know the entire Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers partnership very well starting in 1995: Bernie Lacroute, John Doerr, Brook Byers, Vinod Khosla, Frank Caufield, Kevin Compton, and Will Hearst. I crossed paths with them constantly at the exclusive industry gatherings — Agenda, PC Forum, the Aspen Institute, the Santa Fe Institute — not to mention frequent visits to Kleiner's legendary offices on Sand Hill Road, which had the best free lunch buffet in Silicon Valley: reason enough to schedule meetings there.
Bernie Lacroute was my original point of contact, introduced by my friend Jean-Louis Gassée, the famously flamboyant former head of Apple Engineering. Bernie and I hit it off immediately: a shared technical background programming PDP-8s, PDP-11s and VAX systems, deep familiarity with DEC's RDB database architecture, and an uncompromising devotion to Chateau Margaux — which I have always regarded as the finest wine in the world.
During the high-pressure Evolve Software years I became well known for my daily ritual: the Evolve Speed-Ball. A conventional street speedball was heroin mixed with cocaine cooked in a spoon — the very mix that notoriously set Richard Pryor's hair on fire. Since I never knowingly touched illegal drugs, I developed a legal approximation: a glass of premier Bordeaux (a depressant) immediately followed by a double café latte (a stimulant). A perfectly balanced, mellow afternoon of intense focus, without being put to sleep.
Among the partners, Vinod Khosla was tied with John Doerr as the sharpest mind in the room — intensely serious in those days, not one for my entertaining antics, and deeply interested in complexity theory, which I regarded as the only viable mathematical lens for global-scale coordination; he even did the Santa Fe Institute's complexity summer school around the time he was preparing to launch Khosla Ventures in 2004. But his venture playbook made me deeply cautious: he had co-founded Asera with Bunny Weiss in 1998, treated founder-CEOs as essentially interim, and favored large founding teams with equal splits — which my instinct read as a guaranteed recipe for politics, discord and vulnerability, handing VCs the structural leverage to play founders against one another. I knew my architecture was an audacious multi-decade science project; without super-majority control my life expectancy as founder-CEO would be two to three years. So before I ever set foot in a room to present the plan to Vinod, I wrote the entire concept up as a formal white paper and secured a provisional patent filing. Vinod made me nervous in my youth — and the architecture was protected before the pitch.
The record keeps the orbit, the ritual, and the caution together: the same years produced the relationships, the legend, and the filing discipline that protected the architecture from its own financiers.
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 Kleiner Perkins partner who was Hare's original point of contact — introduced by Jean-Louis Gassée
Open →In the graphPresent at two junctions of this record's financing story, from opposite sides of the table
Open →In the graph“You're like Steve Jobs. You almost got me to invest, and I don't invest in anything.”
Open →In the graphThe Aspen lunch, and passions that ran to sustainability
Open →In the graphThe company of the vignette cycle: Draper's term sheet, the Woodhill coup, the walkout, and two Series A term sheets from a $250k base
Open →In the graphThe coffee break room
Open →In the graphMicrosoft's board, the TOPS study, and the door into everything
Open →