Caltech physics PhD installed as EVP/COO by the board; the first executive Hare could talk to in first principles
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Patrick Nettles was the board's structural answer to the Minor problem: installed as EVP/COO so that the CEO had two direct reports instead of ten, with everything else matrixed to Jonathan Hare as Senior Director of Product Management. He held a PhD from Caltech — in physics or something, as the dictation has it — which mattered enormously to Hare for one specific reason: conversations could proceed from first principles and logic, without metaphor or euphemism. His arrival stabilized the company, and the stock held up for quite a while after.
He owns the record's two finest one-word replies. When Hare called to say he was about to dump every share he owned into a thin market within the hour and Nettles should line up buyers — 'noted.' And when Hare, asked to name a fair acceleration of his options and proposing half, waited for the negotiation — 'done.' The second word cost Hare the other half, a realization that arrived roughly four seconds too late and is preserved in the source record in his own words: you idiot, he was authorized to vest it all.
The arc has an ending, delivered in person. A decade later, at a conference, Nettles — by then founder and CEO of CIENA, the optical networking company whose backers included Jon Bayless's Sevin Rosen — told Hare that he had been right about Mike Minor: Nettles had tried as hard as he could, but could not contain him, and left a couple of years after the revolution to found CIENA. The record notes what that sequence means: the board's stabilizer concluded the diagnosis was correct, and the proof is where he went next. His recollection is still invited — and a standing request, at Hare's direction: anyone who can reconnect him with Patrick is asked to send him this page.
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.
Omnis — the only client-server tool that worked across everything
Open →installed above the objections ofBoss, braggart, and the husband of Hare's mentor. This page is Hare's account of a thirty-year-old conflict, marked as such throughout, and Minor's own account is invited.
Open →CIENA connects him to the family ofBlyth Software — and a connection between two parts of the record
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.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-071The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →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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