Narry Singh was my best friend of the PC Forum years — the record owes him far more than this

Who this is

Narry Singh was Jonathan Hare's best friend of the PC Forum era — the years of Esther Dyson's conference, All Things Digital, Agenda, and the circuit where the record's introductions kept happening. The existing Origins record holds him in exactly one connective fact so far: John Battelle was close to Singh, which is how that thread ran. A best-friendship of years reduced to one sentence is the record's largest known debt-to-page ratio, and this scaffolding exists to be filled: the fuller account is Hare's to dictate, and the ask is filed first.

One biographical fragment landed from S-088, en route to somewhere else entirely: Singh held what the immigration world calls the Einstein visa — the EB-1, for scientists, extraordinary talents, and, in Hare's taxonomy, very connected society people, of whom his old friend Narry was his ready example. The debt-to-page ratio improves by one fact.

S-100 pays the debt down substantially: at the 2003 D1 conference Narry was there beside Hare in the Carlsbad corridor with his long-time girlfriend Tina Berne — and the career arc lands too: CMO of CommerceOne in 2001, later Global Head of Growth for Accenture Digital, and a London Stock Exchange director — the compilation's verdict being that he exemplifies the ultimate Catalyst profile, bridging e-commerce, digital transformation and global capital markets. The best-friendship's page begins to look like one.

S-101 completes the profile — and the origin. The full arc: Stanford M.S. and Panjab University civil engineering; CommerceOne CMO and SVP Global Services in 2001 (the Hoffman/Epstein Sybase orbit intersecting again); partner roles at The McKenna Group and Intellidex; CEO-in-Residence at Battery Ventures; boards and executive roles spanning Tacit, QL2, Architecture for Humanity, Outfit7, the UN Global Entrepreneurs Council, bebe stores and ProSiebenSat.1; Global Head of Growth & Strategy for Accenture Digital; Global Lead Digital at AlixPartners; and a Non-Executive Director seat at the London Stock Exchange. And the origin bypasses corporate networking entirely: Hare's original friendship was with Narry's sister, Sheena Singh — the personal bridge that also extended to Countess Caroline von Bismarck and Stephanie Kaul.

The CES 2009 introduction to Adeo Ressi survives verbatim in the archive (S-124) — Narry speaking that week on online gaming and virtual communities.

Connected from here

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.

Where this came from

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.

What is missing, and how to fix it

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.

• The fuller account — how they met, the years, the arc
• His own account, invited