Vice Chairman of Consilient, and the introduction into Cisco
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Nobel laureate in economics for market signaling, and Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business. A partner at Oak Hill, which led three rounds into Consilient.
He took the title of Vice Chairman at Consilient to help with ecosystem development. The corpus extends his result directly: inverted Spence signaling, where participation is nearly costless and what is revealed is not the capacity to bear cost but what a contribution actually caused.
S-100 adds the record's best economics joke told to its own author: Jonathan Hare ran the D1 corridor technique — the tech founder with a legitimate model at the year's most exclusive conference as an unfakeable signal — past Spence himself over dinner with their mutual friend Frank Caufield, and the man who won the Nobel for formalizing signaling laughed and confirmed: a perfect example of Spence Signaling. Peer review does not come more direct.
S-101 adds Spence's own footnote to the confirmation: the model-based signal was textbook for the technology sector, he noted — but it wouldn't carry in New York finance, where dating models is commonplace. Even the joke got peer-reviewed for external validity.
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Spence introduced Hare to John Morgridge while he was at Consilient. That introduction produced perhaps five meetings at Cisco headquarters, an onward introduction to John Chambers, and eventually relationships with dozens of Cisco executives across two companies and more than a decade.
He was Oak Hill's trophy: a Nobel laureate and former dean who had seen everyone who ever founded a company in the valley. He took Vice Chairman rather than Chairman deliberately — leaving the chair open in case the silver bullet were used and Hare had to be moved into it.
And he was better deployed as endorsement than as principal. He was not a credible entrepreneur or technologist; putting him in the chair would have signaled the wrong thing. Hare was the star and Spence was the cheering section.
Hare's reading: this is Spence signaling, with Spence as the signal — a costly, credible endorsement that works precisely because the endorser has reputation at risk and no operating claim to make. These guys understood the math of it.
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