Harvard then Stanford, Tesseract, Benchmark — and a game of chicken with a city bus
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A Stanford GSB classmate who sat next to Jonathan Hare in class and was noticeably older than the cohort. By Hare's account, possibly the only person to have done his first year at Harvard Business School and his second at Stanford GSB.
Vice president of marketing and then a board member at Tesseract Corporation, where he hired Hare after Blyth Software — so the classmate became the boss. Tesseract's sale to Ceridian was, by Hare's account, where Vaden made his first serious money.
Afterwards a partner at Benchmark, then an $80m fund, where he led the competing offer for Evolve at $8m pre-money against Hambrecht & Quist's $15m with warrants.
S-094 closes the loop the record loves best: the former Tesseract boss who orchestrated the $52M Ceridian sale reappears at Benchmark — the TVI spin-out — offering one of Evolve's two competing Series A term sheets, against Bill Hambrecht's superior terms at H&Q. The employer, the acquirer's origin, and the suitor: one man, three seats. The episode.
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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.
Hare was meeting David Marquardt at the City Club in San Francisco to fund Evolve, which did not yet exist. Vaden turned up unannounced — he could, because Hare had introduced him to Marquardt in the first place.
The timing was awkward for a specific reason. Hare was bringing the entire core technical team from Tesseract across to launch Evolve, and Tesseract had been acquired by Ceridian. An uninvited third party at that meeting risked triggering litigation.
He was very stubborn. He once lost a game of chicken with a city bus, trying to squeeze into the Broadway tunnel, with Hare in the car.
Not a judgment on his ability. He was a turnaround specialist — which is exactly what Tesseract needed and exactly what a company trying to define a new category did not. Combined with an $80m fund that could not have led a stepped-up Series B, and a habit of appearing in Hare's meetings uninvited, the $8m offer was never going to win against $15m and Bill Hambrecht.
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.
1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →board member; hired HareA mainframe company turned client-server, and sold for a 500% year
Open →whose offer beat hisLed the diligence that put Bill Hambrecht on Evolve's board. Died at forty-four.
Open →introduced to him by HareMicrosoft's board, the TOPS study, and the door into everything
Open →the company Hare left to join himOmnis — the only client-server tool that worked across everything
Open →orchestrated the sale toThe acquirer whose extortion-by-letter evaporated after one phone call
Open →the competing sheet againstThe H&Q venture legend, one of Evolve's two competing Series A offers
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-028The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-033The 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.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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