Microsoft's board, the TOPS study, and the door into everything
Parts of this entry are out of date. It is published anyway, because an incomplete record that invites correction is more useful than no record at all.
Co-founder and general partner of Technology Venture Investors, later founder of August Capital, and for many years the only outside venture investor on Microsoft's board.
The class project Jonathan Hare did for him — a study of TGV Software, a cross-platform networking company on whose board he sat — is the hinge of the whole early record. It put Hare into Microsoft, and it is why he bought every book on networking he could find.
S-100 dates the mentorship's sharpest exchange: a pivotal 1992 lunch at which Marquardt asked Hare who the big winner of his GSB class would be — noting that Scott McNealy had been the undisputed big winner of the classes of '79–'80 — and the 2003 D1 corridor where Marquardt, spotting Hare with McNealy and Meg Whitman, completed the three-billionaire circle himself.
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TGV Software built TCP/IP networking bridging Macintosh, PC, Unix and VMS systems, and Marquardt sat on its board through Technology Venture Investors. Hare already knew something about networking, having taken a course on IBM's Systems Network Architecture — what he had used on IBM machines in the seventies and eighties. The study led to a summer placement in Building 1 at Microsoft, and to a standing relationship.
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Gave Hare his nickname, and the introduction that started the arc
Open →board memberBuilding 1, 1991 — the nucleus, and where the coordination problem was named
Open →portfolio company“Two Guys and a VAX” — the class project, and the door into Microsoft
Open →the deep history withSun's CEO, the undisputed big winner of GSB '79–'80 — one of three billionaires pulled into a single D1 conversation circle
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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Read the source →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.
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