A $10m lead investment in crowdsourced solutions — in 2001
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A major Consilient customer and, in 2001, the sponsor of a strategic deal in which BP would make a $10m lead investment in a crowdsourcing model to develop solutions on the Consilient platform — sponsored by Lord John Browne, then chief executive.
It is worth noting what that is: a large industrial company proposing to fund distributed, incentivized development on a shared coordination platform, in 2001. It is the Accelerator model, twenty-five years early, and it did not survive the change of management.
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Ray Lane, newly out of the Oracle presidency and just arrived at Kleiner Perkins, explained the attraction:
I know why Lord John Browne likes you. His vision of BP is one giant room full of computers, him, and that's it. The virtual corporation.
That is the coordination thesis, stated by the chief executive of one of the largest industrial companies on earth, around the year 2000. Browne had independently reached the position that the firm is a coordination artifact which could in principle be dissolved into computation — which is Coase, restated by an operator rather than an economist, twenty-five years before this architecture proposed the mechanism. He was also interested in complexity theory.
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Three rounds, a silver bullet, and the end of Hare's tenure
Open →the same thesis, from the other sideNamed at Microsoft in 1991. Still the claim.
Open →led byThe oil CEO who was actually an environmentalist: Beyond Petroleum, the fuel-strike week, and a vision Wall Street refused to fund
Open →sponsored the work throughGroup CIO without an IT background: North Sea driller, president of the Baku operation, hilarious, and the best guide to BP a vendor ever had
Open →later led byThe geologist in line for the top job, met privately at Browne's request — and the safety application they worked on together carries the record's heaviest irony
Open →the first seven-figure deal closed byVP of Marketing & Software Alliances at Consilient; negotiated the BP safety-incident deal in London, September 2000. Her LinkedIn still lists BP as the marquee account.
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-063The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This record is not biography attached to a technical claim. Each runs into the other: the experiences below produced the mechanisms, and the mechanisms are what those experiences turned out to require.
This page is the anecdote — the thing that draws you in. The explainers are where the mechanism is set out in full, with the problem it solves and the condition on which it fails.
The mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Consilient Innovators NetworkThe mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →Quantum Adaptive Systems TheoryThe mechanism, set out in full with the condition that would defeat it.
Open the explainer →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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