Stanford Graduate School of Business, class of 1992 · The Graph

Organization

What this is

Jonathan Hare took his MBA there, graduating in 1992 as an Arjay Miller Scholar.

The faculty in this graph is unusually dense: Michael Spence as dean, Myron Scholes, Mark Wolfson, Garth Saloner, Robert Burgelman, Irv Grousbeck, David Brady, and Andy Grove teaching his first course there. Two of them hold Nobel prizes whose results this architecture extends directly.

Two years of work experience was effectively a rule for admission; Hare knew of exactly one classmate admitted straight from undergraduate. He himself was twenty-four when he applied in the spring of 1990.

Grades ran H, P+, P, P− and a fail; students could not report them, recruiters could not ask on pain of being barred from campus, and nothing was released until after graduation. Arjay Miller Scholar designated the academically highest ten percent of the class — and was, by Hare's account, the one signal that leaked.

Settled from Stanford's own records: the award is named for Arjay Miller, the school's fourth dean (1969–79) and formerly president of Ford, and recognizes the top ten percent academically. The Henry Ford II Scholar — the prize Hare was leading for and lost in his final semester — goes to the single highest student in the class. A recommended grading curve in each course caps the overall GPA a professor may award.

S-094 adds a corridor note: Ken Rudin finished his GSB MBA a couple of years after Hare, and the school's network supplied the introduction to Larry Sonsini — the record's defining legal relationship, sourced from a classmate-once-removed.

The record

Where this intersects the work

Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.

Jonathan’s account · S-153 →Jonathan’s account · S-155 →Jonathan’s account · S-158 →Jonathan’s account · S-160 →Jonathan’s account · S-172 →Jonathan’s account · S-180 →

L1 · SummaryThe graphYou are here — rapid understanding, forwardable

L2 · EpisodeThe storyHis story, in his voice — ../../episodes/resume-in-the-wrong-pile/L3 · SourceIn his own wordsThe verbatim account — immutable, with its research context

The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.

Spring 1992

The Henry Ford II Scholar he did not become

He was in the top five going into the final semester and, by his classmate Basil Karampelas's account from the registrar, leading for the top graduate spot. He was also working part-time for Microsoft on one of the first copies of Remote Access Server — dialling into the Microsoft network to teach himself. He blew off most of his classes, took P-pluses instead of As, and lost it. He rescheduled a flight to Europe by two weeks to attend a graduation where the prize went to somebody else.

Hare's accountAuthor's direct narrative — source record S-012

The graph

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.

dean

Michael Spence, Nobel laureate: why he took Vice Chairman and not the chair

Vice Chairman of Consilient, and the introduction into Cisco

Open →taught there

Andy Grove's first Stanford class — which I got into by accident

The class Hare got stuck in, which changed everything

Open →professor

Robert Burgelman taught the strategy course, and I loved him

Co-taught the course, and Hare loved him

Open →professor

David Brady taught me the Wall Street Journal Test

The Wall Street Journal Test

Open →contemporary

Laurene Powell Jobs: two red cars on the Oval, the Culture Club, the roach coach — and everything she is a link away from

A year ahead at Stanford GSB; a symphony series; a borrowed Ferrari that was Steve Jobs's. Now: Emerson Collective, The Atlantic, and a network the record wants to reach

Open →MBA 1992

Jonathan Paul Hare, who invented the Quantum Privacy Network

Consilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from

Open →classmate

John Hurley deferred Stanford to command a tank in the Gulf War

Deferred Stanford to command a tank in the Gulf

Open →classmate

Val Vaden: Harvard then Stanford, my boss, then the competing term sheet

Harvard then Stanford, Tesseract, Benchmark — and a game of chicken with a city bus

Open →its incentive design

Berkeley forced a 2.7 average. Stanford barred recruiters from asking. Same students, opposite behavior

Stanford engineered collaboration. Harvard engineered competition. Both worked.

Open →classmate — the registrar's tip

Basil Karampelas

The classmate who made him come to graduation — 'you might be the number one graduate'

Open →class of 1991

JJ Mullane co-founded the gourmet organic roach coach with Laurene Powell — and is one of my good friends

Stanford GSB class of 1991; Terravera's co-founder with Laurene Powell Jobs; the man Hare sent Julia Seidelin to for a raw-foods restaurant

Open →

Provenance

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.

Primary source · S-011