“Audacious to the point of recklessness”
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A physician, and by Jonathan Hare's account someone who has spent her working life in relief medicine — saving lives in places without running water or sanitation.
Hare met her through John Clippinger, who was seeing her at the time. She nominated him for the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship in November 2007, having known him about two years.
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Reproduced exactly as she sent it, because her words are better than any summary of them. Marie Charles wrote this and holds the copyright in it; it is published here at Hare's request as the subject, and would be removed on hers.
November 16th, 2007
Peter Reiling, Executive Director
Henry Crown Fellowship Program
The Aspen Institute
1227 De La Vina Street
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
Dear Peter:
It is with great pleasure that I nominate Jonathan Hare as a candidate for Henry Crown fellow. I've known Jonathan for nearly two years, and was impressed from the start at his fearless passion in pursuing a grand and worthy vision. I was struck by thoughtful he was on how innovative technology can be used to harness the forces of self-interested capitalism to serve the needs of society, the environment, and the poorest of the poor in the developing world.
He puts real energy into pursuing these goals. For example, he is the Chairman of the EO Wilson Foundation technical advisory board, leading an initiative supported by Google, Microsoft and a host of educational and scientific organizations to develop an information ecosystem that makes it possible to search, analyze, and share knowledge and coordinate activities across disparate disciplines, people and organizations. The ultimate objective of this effort is to enhance global sustainability by facilitating innovation in healthcare, clean technologies, and the life sciences.
By all accounts and from my own experience Jonathan has a soaring and expansive intellect. He delights in discovering the hidden patterns and relationships between different disciplines — history, biology, physics, economics, mathematics, politics, etc. — and how that understanding can be applied to practical problems. I understand from mutual friends that he has spent a fair amount of time at the Santa Fe Institute, and it apparently it has had an impact on him — and vice versa.
Jonathan applies this unusually holistic perspective and idealistic goals in his entrepreneurial endeavors. He has founded three startups — Evolve, Consilient and Resilient Networks. All of them were audacious to the point of recklessness. I have some visibility into the most recent, and have heard about the others from mutual friends and colleagues. From what I gather and from what I've seen, Resilient's “trust network” is extremely novel and disruptive technology. It has the potential to have absolutely sweeping impact on US and global healthcare, and promises to transform any market that depends upon trust.
I am confident that Jonathan would thrive in the Henry Crown fellowship program, and that you would enjoy having him in it. He is very good natured and energetic, is tolerant and open-minded, and is irreverent in a light-hearted way. He has an amazing knack for meeting interesting people and thought leaders, engaging their interest, and developing a lasting connection. I expect great things from him, and I think appointing him as a Henry Crown fellow would propel him to even greater heights, sooner.
Sincerely,
Marie Charles
It is dated November 2007 and it contains, in somebody else's words, the thesis this entire record is about: how innovative technology can be used to harness the forces of self-interested capitalism to serve the needs of society, the environment, and the poorest of the poor.
That is Universal Capitalism, described by a third party, twenty years before the corpus that formalizes it — which makes it independent corroboration of when the argument existed rather than a retrospective claim about it.
It also independently documents the E. O. Wilson Foundation initiative supported by Google and Microsoft, and Resilient's trust network as extremely novel and disruptive with the potential to transform any market that depends on trust.
And her characterization of the three companies — audacious to the point of recklessness — is the most accurate three words anyone has written about them.
John Clippinger had met her somewhere in that circuit — Davos, or a save-the-world symposium at the Aspen Institute, possibly through their mutual friend Charlie Firestone, the Institute's identity expert. He did not say exactly. What he said was that she was beautiful, a medical doctor, dedicated to saving the world, and much younger than him.
He was frankly astonished when she agreed to a weekend up the coast from San Francisco to Sea Ranch, and asked Hare for recommendations — where to stay, where to eat, which trails. That was Hare's territory; Clippinger split his time between Cambridge and a New Hampshire farm where he hunted wild turkey with a bow, by way of preparing for whatever apocalypse or pandemic might eventually arrive.
3040 Steiner was the staging ground. Clippinger took the spare room; she arrived a day later, probably from Asia, since that is where she was working. She was everything he had described and more — in Hare's description, a full-sized Tinker Bell, with the short blonde cut Audrey Hepburn wore doing relief work, which is entirely practical in a jungle or a desert with no plumbing. Beautiful, and exuberantly happy. She hugged him on arrival and thanked him for putting them up.
She has been his friend ever since.
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.
Berkman Center, the 1999 commission — and a witness in the room in 2008
Open →the foundation she citesThe commission, the foundation, and the name
Open →what she assessedThe trust network, and the intelligence years
Open →the weekendThe first planned ecological community — and Hare's weekend territory
Open →the probable connectionThe Aspen Institute's identity expert
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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