Russ DeLeon put $1 million into Resilient — and lost WebShield's first cheque to a fight with Chevron

Who this is

Russ DeLeon was one of Jonathan Hare's best friends, and appears in the record first in London in 2000 — Evolve Software's VP of International Business Development, walking near Trafalgar Square the day Hare saw his first BMW Z8 in the metal. When the arc reached Resilient Network Systems, DeLeon invested $1 million. When it reached WebShield, he was to write the first cheque — $100,000 — and had to pull back.

The reason was not doubt. DeLeon had financed a lawsuit against Chevron on behalf of native tribespeople in Ecuador, over the environmental damage Texaco — which merged with Chevron — did to the rainforest at the headwaters of the Amazon, and the financing pulled him into a serious legal battle with Chevron itself. That wider litigation is among the most extensively documented and bitterly contested legal fights of its era, and this page deliberately does not relitigate it: what the record carries is what Hare knows directly — what his friend chose to fund, and what the choice cost the friendship's next investment. A man who backs a rainforest over a sure seat at his best friend's next company is, whatever else the litigation record says, consistent — and consistency is the quality this record grades highest.

The record notes the shape without forcing it: the Nature and Humanity Trust exists so that defending the commons does not require any individual to absorb this kind of cost alone. DeLeon absorbed it alone. His account of all of it is the standing ask.

S-094 restores the trench years: Russ quit Morrison & Foerster to join Evolve as in-house counsel after the Il Fornaio walkout — ‘I'm calling my buddy Russ Deleon at MoFo’ is the walkout speech's operative sentence — and led the dialing-for-dollars campaign from the $250,000 first close to two competing Series A term sheets. The PartyGaming empire with Ruth Parasol came years later; the record notes he was a formidable operator in the trenches first. The episode.

Per S-113: Ruth Parasol — girlfriend, then wife, then PartyGaming co-founder — completes his page's other half; the two couples' travels (the Italian coast to France with Tullan; Sea Ranch and Mendocino) are on her page and in the source.

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.

• His account — of Evolve's London years, the Resilient investment, and the Ecuador fight as he would tell it
• The timing of the WebShield pullback against the company's founding
• Whether the Ecuador litigation should hold its own page, told with his participation