One young entrepreneur a year. Thirty minutes.
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati — by some distance the top technology law firm, representing roughly seventy percent of the valley's technology companies in that period.
A proud Cal graduate. He took on approximately one young entrepreneur a year to mentor. Ken Rudin had been one, and made the introduction. Sonsini was counsel, investor and director at Consilient, and had incorporated Evolve Software with Jonathan Hare when it was still called Cortez Software International.
S-094 delivers the full mentorship chapter, and it is one of the record's richest: the Ken Rudin introduction; the thirty-minute pitch; the two real reasons it worked (fierce Berkeley loyalty meeting a third-generation Cal graduate, and the Microsoft bridge — Ballmer, Allchin, Marquardt — that the Valley's most connected lawyer admitted he lacked); the ‘all art, no science’ blueprint delivered verbatim; the $20,000 investment cap, the board seat, free legal until financing; the week Hare spent shopping Cooley, Brobeck, Gunderson and VLG, who all warned he'd be handed off; Larry's promise to do the work himself — kept, for a month, a bit sloppily, a decade out of term-sheet practice; and ‘Absolutely,’ the one-word answer when asked if WSGR would stay after the institutional money walked. The blueprint episode and the walkout carry it in full.
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That was the allocation. What followed was two decades of counsel across four companies.
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The introduction to Sonsini
Open →both Cal“Imaginary engineers” — third floor, Etcheverry Hall
Open →the Consilient boardThree rounds, a silver bullet, and the end of Hare's tenure
Open →first counsel toThe company of the vignette cycle: Draper's term sheet, the Woodhill coup, the walkout, and two Series A term sheets from a $250k base
Open →assignedFirst-year out of Stanford Law, economics undergraduate, the associate who understood that startups need money
Open →assigned, then reassignedHarvard JD-MBA, fifth-year at WSGR — right lawyer, per Hare's account, for a different kind of company
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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