The acquisition machine, and the era it defined
Parts of this entry are out of date.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.
Chief executive of Cisco Systems from 1995 to 2015, and the architect of an acquisition strategy that absorbed a very large share of the networking hardware industry — which is why so many companies in this graph end up inside Cisco.
Details here are as Jonathan Hare recalls them and have not been checked.
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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.
The introduction came from John Morgridge, and led on to relationships with dozens of Cisco executives over the following decade.
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.
Five meetings at headquarters, and the introduction onward
Open →chief executiveWhere the networking industry went
Open →colleagueCisco's CTO, more than once — and a Santa Fe Institute regular
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.
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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