Resilient Network Systems: Esther Dyson, the ODNI, and the IRS deployment

What this is

The corporate origin is now documented (S-125/S-126): a separate company from the original Resilient Networks, Inc., incorporated as Emergent Networks, Inc., a Delaware corporation — Jonathan Hare's three million founder's shares transferred July 17, 2008 for $3,000, a founding valuation whose modesty is the bankruptcy-aftermath story in one number — and renamed by the time of the May 2010 Series A. Its purpose was the Resilient Trust Network, Hare's invention for the global person-centered security problem. The first years ran on three engineers earning $7.50 to $15 an hour and Hare's brother Milton; then just Hare and the engineers, until Louis Woodhill's investment of roughly $500,000 — timing to be confirmed, with the May 2010 round the likely candidate.

The May 2010 consents, read in full (S-127), narrow the record further: by that financing the company was already Resilient Network Systems, Inc. under an Amended and Restated Certificate — bounding the rename between July 2008 and May 2010 — and the round itself was a rolling Series A: the 2010 action approved a Second Amended and Restated purchase agreement expanding cumulative Series A sales to 6,200,000 shares of an 8,500,000-share authorization, precisely the instrument an additional investor would come in on.

The company through which Hare spent a decade solving cross-boundary trust verification: establishing identity, reputation, privileges and trust relationships without anyone revealing anything.

Investors included Alsop Louie Ventures and Esther Dyson. Eric Haseltine joined the board as chief scientist. Its production proof of concept was the 2014–16 IRS §6055 deployment with Aetna, Experian Health and LexisNexis.

S-092 adds a coda to the company's decline: after Hare's departure, as Resilient slowly went out of business, it stopped prosecuting the patent estate — including at least one application that had already reached allowance, the examiner's yes abandoned for want of fees. The granted patents of the era, and the allowable that died with the company, are being assembled from primary documents on the portfolio page.

The wind-down now has its documented artifact (S-093): on May 20, 2021, the company's patent estate — including US 8,843,997, the Resilient Trust Network patent itself — was assigned to Data443 Risk Mitigation, Inc., which also operates the old resilient-networks.com team pages to this day, Hare's and Bill Coleman's among them. A company's intellectual property changing hands in its final years is the paper trail of exactly the decline Hare described.

S-100 supplies the origin chapter — with one conflict flagged for Hare's ruling rather than resolved. The compilation's account: born 2003 out of the dot-com collapse and September 11th; the product concept first dubbed the Universal Process Server, rebranded the Resilient Thread Server after consultation with Esther Dyson; a person-centered network of end-to-end authentication, encryption and authorization; the founding exchange preserved verbatim — Gary Bolles at The Grove asking what kind of processes it was for, Hare answering 'All of them,' and Bolles, after the laugh, conceding 'Of course. Stupid question.' Then Ed Ekstrom's Intel Capital advice forcing the vertical choice, and healthcare chosen. THE FLAG: the corpus's era-facts for this page (the 2010 patent priority, Health 2.0 Fall 2010, the 2013–14 White House briefings) sit years after a 2003 founding, and the corpus has always listed 'Resilient' and 'Resilient Network Systems' as separate names — one company with a long arc, or two successive companies? Hare to rule; both readings preserved until he does.

S-101 resolves this page's standing conflict on Hare's authority: one company, one arc — launched as Resilient in 2003 from the smoking crater of the dot-com collapse and 9/11 (which together took down Evolve and the first Consilient), through the Thread Server years, the healthcare pivot, the 2010 patent priority and Health 2.0 debut, the White House era — and then the ending the record had never carried: by late 2013 a severe governance crisis, with investor Louis Woodhill and Alsop Louie Partners taking board control, installing Bill Coleman as CEO, and marginalizing Hare into a figurehead Executive Chairman role. The counter-coalition (AJ Agarwal's $200,000, Billy Tauzin, Jack Lewin, and the recruitment of Richard Spires), the 2014 alliance that formed against the founder, the rejected WebShield spin-out, and Hare's termination from the company he founded are the coup episode. He walked away from the wreckage and built WebShield independently, taking the pure architectural principles with him — which the May 2021 Data443 assignment of the patent estate then corroborates as the wind-down's paper trail.

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 exact rename date — the Delaware Certificate of Amendment filing between July 2008 and May 2010 will carry it
• Woodhill's tranche — was the ~$500k in the May 2010 expansion, or earlier? The purchase agreement's schedule of purchasers settles it in one line
• Colleagues and customers from 2008–2016
• A distinguishing identifier for brother Milton Hare, so his page can exist without conflation with their father