Led the diligence that put Bill Hambrecht on Evolve's board. Died at forty-four.
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Daniel H. Case III — Princeton 1979, Phi Beta Kappa, then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He spent his entire career at Hambrecht & Quist, was named chief executive at thirty-six, took the firm public in 1996 and merged it with Chase Manhattan in 1999, becoming chairman of JP Morgan H&Q.
He joined H&Q in 1979 after Bill Hambrecht asked Princeton's faculty to recommend the school's smartest student for a summer internship. He was one of the principal forces behind the financing of the technology sector through the 1990s — H&Q underwrote the IPOs of Apple and Amazon among many others.
He died on 27 June 2002, aged forty-four, of glioblastoma, after a year's illness. In his last year he founded Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure with his brother Steve.
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Dan Case led the due diligence on Evolve Software that produced Hambrecht & Quist's investment: $15m pre-money with warrants attached. The competing offer came from Benchmark at $8m pre-money, led by Val Vaden.
So H&Q was the better price as well as the better name — and there were two further reasons. Benchmark was then an $80m fund, and Jonathan Hare was concerned it could not afford a stepped-up Series B. And the partner would have been Vaden, who was a turnaround specialist rather than a growth investor, and who had a habit of inserting himself into Hare's deals.
What H&Q also brought was Bill Hambrecht on the board — which is the part that mattered, and the part that was later withdrawn when staff replaced him.
In January 1983 Dan Case introduced his younger brother Steve to Bill von Meister of Control Video Corporation. That company became America Online.
Which is to say: the man who led the diligence on Evolve is also the reason AOL exists — and it was through him, via Bill Hambrecht, that Hare was later introduced to Steve.
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Introduced by Bill Hambrecht, after his brother's death
Open →chief executiveThe bank that took Evolve public — and the board seat that cost it
Open →led the competing Benchmark offerHarvard then Stanford, Tesseract, Benchmark — and a game of chicken with a city bus
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.
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