General Magic's telephony chief; OnStar's Virtual Advisor; QuietRock's inventor; the Empire State Building's windows; Inc.'s 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Serious Energy founder — the role the film's own credits give, and all this page takes from the public record. In this record for one stated reason: Kevin Surace is one of the twenty-two credited narrators of the Silicon Valley Historical Association's Steve Jobs: Visionary Entrepreneur, and Jonathan Hare records having met and having connections to him (S-183). Where, when and through whom are not yet on the record; Hare's earlier account (S-182) is that most of these connections ran through Laurene Powell Jobs. The page is a placeholder that says so, and an invitation to either side to fill it.
The public record, at web grade (verified 1 September 2026). RIT engineering; National Semiconductor, IBM and Seiko Epson; the first cellular data phone at Air Communications in the early 1990s; then General Magic, where he ran the telephony group of sixty and built Portico — the first large-scale AI voice assistant, years before Siri or Alexa — and the team behind General Motors' OnStar Virtual Advisor. Later chairman and CEO of Serious Materials/Serious Energy, inventor of QuietRock soundproof drywall, and lead on the Empire State Building windows energy retrofit; Inc. Magazine's 2009 Entrepreneur of the Year, a CNBC Innovator of the Decade, a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer; 94 patents; now chairman and CTO of Appvance and chairman of Token. In this record's network: the virtual-assistant lineage he started is the prehistory of the AI this record now argues with and about — the ancestor argument's first generation — and the Serious Energy chapter puts him one conversation from the record's sustainability bench (the Fellows), where his energy-retrofit economics would be recognized on sight.
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Silicon Valley Historical Association, January 2013 — built on a 1994 interview at NeXT; twenty-two credited voices, twelve of whom Hare records having met
Open →the film's subjectHP as a teenager, Terman's Valley, an Oregon commune, India, Zen — the parallels the record can actually show; and the borrowed Ferrari, the Z8, and the woman who connects them
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.
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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