Doug Merritt, met at the PC Forum lunch table

Who this is

Met at the same PC Forum lunch table where Jonathan Hare met Larry Tesler. Stub entry pending his own account.

Doug Merritt is one of Hare's best friends — his own words, preserved verbatim in S-084 — and the friendship began where so much of this record begins: at Esther Dyson's PC Forum, when Merritt was running PeopleSoft's HR business. When Oracle's famously hostile eighteen-month takeover swallowed PeopleSoft, Merritt — who, in Hare's telling, hated Oracle — moved to SAP, and from inside SAP he became the sponsor who carried Hare's work up the organization, while Hare reached Bill McDermott's federal side independently: the two-track approach into a matrixed giant, product sponsorship on one side and go-to-market muscle on the other.

Merritt's public arc since — CEO of Splunk, then Aviatrix — is the era's history. The record's debt is stated plainly: a best-friendship carried in one extracted paragraph is scaffolding, and the full telling is Hare's to dictate.

Doug Merritt is one of Hare's best friends — met at Esther Dyson's PC Forum when Merritt ran PeopleSoft's HR business, the crown-jewel product line of Oracle's hostile takeover era. Merritt, in Hare's words, hated Oracle; when the acquisition closed he moved to SAP, and from there he sponsored Hare's work up the organization — the product-side arm of the two-sided approach into SAP, with the Bill McDermott federal side entered separately. His public arc since: SAP's global field operations, then chief executive of Splunk, then Aviatrix. A best-friendship this record has only begun to page, and says so.

S-094 lands the coincidence the record files under Burke: decades after Joy Avalon Stansberry took refuge on The Cats, the subdivided estate's luxury homes included one purchased by Merritt — during his SAP or Cisco days, the uncertainty Hare's own. Hare's grandmother and Hare's best friend, the same gate, seventy years apart.

The full arc, documented from his supplied record (S-095): Accenture, then Oracle itself — 1989–91, the Utilities sector's first telesales rep, which deepens the comedy of everything that followed — then PowerSoft (employee #17) and Patrol (employee #4) in the client/server years; founder and CEO of Icarian, 1996–2001, one of the first cloud workforce-management applications and one of the first Kleiner Perkins Java Fund companies — which makes him and Hare contemporaneous founders, building Icarian and Evolve in the same years, before PC Forum ever introduced them; PeopleSoft's $1 billion HCM division, 2001–2004, the seat he held when they met; SAP as EVP and Corporate Officer, 2005–2011, reporting to the Executive Board — the sponsorship years; then Baynote, Birst, and Cisco's portfolio-wide product marketing (2012–14, the Los Gatos years); Splunk from 2014, SVP of the field and then the internal succession candidate, and as CEO from November 2015 leading the transformation he describes as changing every airplane part in flight at high speed — ARR from $220 million to $3.12 billion by his 2021 departure; and Aviatrix as Chairman, CEO and President since July 2023. The best-friendship's professional backdrop, now on the documented record.

Per S-112, the standing on the record: a close friend and mentor — on Hare's advisory boards many times over, a host many times over, both wives known — and the champion at every company he was at, all the way to Splunk.

Connected from here

There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.

Where this came from

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.

What is missing, and how to fix it

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.

• His own account of the relationship
• The full telling of the friendship and the SAP years
• The federal deal's specifics — which GSA vehicle, and what happened
• The friendship's fuller account — decades of it, from Hare
• His own account, invited