Origins

Where the thesis came from

A graduate statistics project at Stanford in 1991, analyzing United Nations infant-mortality data across Africa, found female education to be the dominant correlate. Traveling through India, the Maldives and Sri Lanka in 1993, Hare reached the conclusion the corpus now states formally: that population and affluence are locked terms, that the technology coefficient is the only free one, and that commercial self-interest would lay the fiber and connect the labor long before any charitable instinct did.

What remained unsolved was a global decentralized market for all resources, including human capability — a coordination layer, the same Business Process Abstraction Layer identified at Microsoft two years earlier.

Independently formulated, then recognized

A January 1998 whitepaper argued that enterprise applications fail because they embed business practice into brittle code, and proposed an organic alternative modeled explicitly on biological inheritance — organisms support evolution because DNA provides a built-in mechanism for continuity and change across generations. That is the Quantum Evolution mechanism, identified twenty-eight years before the corpus that formalizes it, applied to the wrong substrate.

In September 1998 a draft treatise, Adaptive Systems Analysis, argued that physics, chemistry, cosmology and biochemistry occupy a coherent intellectual framework with a stable foundation; that economics, politics, business and sociology have no such framework; and that this absence is why those fields fail predictively. It states the governing principle as the correlation between unification, integration and truth.

The Einstein centenary

The Aspen Physics Institute marked the hundredth anniversary of Einstein's 1905 annus mirabilis, in which he published four papers of Nobel caliber — among them the photoelectric effect, which established the quantum of energy underlying the quantum mechanics of the 1920s, and special relativity, precursor to the 1916 general theory. An invitation-only event, attended by hundreds of the most illustrious physicists alive, honoring the man Time had named its Person of the Century. Hare attended on a courtesy pass to the afternoon cocktail party.

The reason the entry belongs on this site: quantum mechanics and general relativity are the first two provably verified rungs of the consilience ladder Wilson described. Everything the architecture claims about the rungs above them is a claim about extending a ladder whose lower reaches are the most thoroughly confirmed structures in science.

Murray Gell-Mann, and the coffee break room

Gell-Mann moderated the centenary and gave the opening keynote. Hare had met him dozens of times at the Santa Fe Institute — mostly because he spent his time in the coffee break room, talking to whoever came in for a refill, either explaining Organic Technology and Business DNA or asking how complex adaptive systems might be generalized to the general case. Having talked his way through a dozen of his favorite physicists at the cocktail party, he ran into Gell-Mann, who invited him to the keynote and walked him into the hall.

He sat at the back, to see the whole audience, and was joined shortly afterwards by Brian Greene and his future wife, just returned from a hike up Aspen Mountain. Hare had read The Elegant Universe and met Greene several times since.

The terminology exchange. Hare suggested Gell-Mann adopt John Holland's nomenclature, on the grounds that it was the most widely used and the more elegant. Gell-Mann replied that he preferred his own, and handed over a copy of The Quark and the Jaguar — a book covering the ground of a dozen other complex-adaptive-systems books in terminology he had invented himself, including his own term for complexity theory, which nobody else ever adopted. Hare did not press it. Gell-Mann had proposed and named quarks in 1964 and taken the Nobel in 1969; he had earned that deference, at least to his face.

Transformational figures in science and technology frequently succeed because of enormous self-confidence and a willingness to defy doubters and orthodoxy, and that often presents as an outsized ego. Gell-Mann's principal reward was a lifetime pass to wear his on his sleeve, which he exercised with regularity. He was among Hare's heroes — which is precisely why Hare suggested he reconsider rather than telling him he was wrong. Away from him, Hare's assessment was blunter: the ego matched the achievements, and it was an obstacle to progress in the field. His terminology went unadopted; Holland's became standard.

The path at Aspen Meadows

Hare returned the following summer, staying with Pam Alexander, who supplied an all-access pass to the first Aspen Ideas Festival. He did not know Wilson was attending, let alone giving the opening keynote. They met by chance on the main path between the two ends of Aspen Meadows — the beautiful one everyone knows — while Hare was walking with Bill Joy. It resumed a conversation that had lapsed for five years, and everything in the record from 2006 onward follows from it.

Lunch followed immediately, with John Doerr and Vinod Khosla. Hare joined the table uninvited, knowing both well, and sat between Khosla on his left and Doerr. He pitched the whole vision to Doerr, whose real passions ran to sustainability, healthcare and cybersecurity rather than to the internet and web deals that had made him rich.

Why he could be uninvited. He had been camping out in Kleiner Perkins' offices at will, having been gently advised by Scott Sandell to find somewhere other than NEA's office to camp in, after the NEA partnership declined to invest. Dick Kramlich and Sandell both liked the pitches and met with him many times over the years. Kramlich was unusual in insisting on a non-hierarchical partnership in which he did not hold the final vote — and his partnership overruled him. Sandell preserved the philosophy while breaking precedent by taking the title of chief executive, unheard of in venture, because sovereign wealth funds as limited partners preferred a counterpart whose title meant something.

The cabin, and the company she kept

A chestnut log cabin on the highest point of Scientists Cliffs, with the spectacular views, the massive trees, and no television. Books, board games, and a serious wine and spirits collection. Hare stayed there nearly every weekend for a few years, and for the occasional couple of weeks over decades, until she could no longer live independently.

He was the only person in the area under forty; most residents were in their sixties through their nineties. It was, in all likelihood, a haven for people who had worked on classified programs, with the National Institutes of Health and National Academy of Sciences contingent supplying the cover story. Several of them confirmed the family history — reliably, after three or four bourbons.

Her own record is public and substantial: a career at the World Bank, and board service with the Scientists' Cliffs Association, the American Chestnut Land Trust, and the League of Women Voters.

The history she carried

Recorded as the family account. Work that was compartmented cannot be corroborated in public — that is what compartmented means — so this is stated as what June told her grandson personally, dozens of times, and what his contemporaries at Scientists Cliffs confirmed. It is offered as oral history rather than as documented fact, which is the honest form and the more credible one.

• Founding president of both the Operations Research Society of America and the American Astronautical Society — the first of which named the discipline his grandson would later read at Berkeley.
• A doctorate in nuclear physics from Iowa; rocket and explosives research at the National Bureau of Standards during the war; five years teaching physics at Berkeley; then physics professor and graduate dean at Pacific Union College, the Adventist college his future son-in-law would attend.
• President of Clarkson Institute of Technology, 1963–1966, where he set out to turn a small college into a center of engineering — and afterwards ran a Washington computer firm, CTE Systems, until his death in 1980.
• A nuclear physicist who, by family account, worked on the Manhattan Project and later on the H-bomb with Teller — on the atomic trigger that sets off the cascade, which Hare suspects was the hardest part of it.
• Head or deputy head of the Operations Research Laboratory at Johns Hopkins, where the strategy that became Mutual Assured Destruction was devised — built on the equilibrium concept of John Nash at Princeton, and credited within the family with keeping the superpowers from war for fifty years.
• Vice President of Martin's air and space division, leading development of the Titan II, the largest intercontinental ballistic missile the United States ever fielded.
• First acting Director of ARPA. After Sputnik he was transferred off a classified defense project and assigned to organize and launch the agency — the same way Oppenheimer was assigned to create the Los Alamos part of the Manhattan Project. Public rosters record Roy Johnson, who was appointed afterwards; they do not record who stood the agency up, because the man who did it came from somewhere that could not be named.
• He wrote the requirement that produced the internet. The Titan II silos were the second-strike arm of the nuclear arsenal — the ones that had to launch after a Soviet first strike. Keeping command able to reach them once everything above ground was gone is the survivable-communications problem that produced packet switching. He defined that requirement, because he had led the project at Johns Hopkins that produced Mutual Assured Destruction, using game theory and simulation, and was involved in designing the launch control systems themselves.
• Deputy Chief Scientist at the Pentagon after leaving Clarkson, from 1966 — the years in which the network that became ARPANET was designed against exactly that requirement.
• He knew Van Allen, of the belts. He knew the Mercury Seven. He was a rocket scientist, and he knew everyone.

Software as a Service, in a basement

His last job, after retiring from the government, the military and everything adjacent to them, was a company in his basement that ran a hosted application for managing liquor-store inventories. This is not a parable.

He thought it was foolish for companies to own computers and write their own applications. So he bought a number of machines — ridiculously expensive in those days, and it consumed the entirety of his daughter's inheritance — and ran the software for other businesses. There happened to be a liquor store near the house.

The application was not the point; the platform was. The full thread, from that basement to AWS →

What she taught without saying anything

On the first visit to Washington after the funeral, June took the boys to the Smithsonian — a dozen museums, and Air and Space and Natural History a dozen times each. Hare loved rocks and rockets, and still does.

They ran in. He remembers running and turning a slow circle in the entrance hall because there were more flags than he had ever seen. After a minute or two he realized his grandmother was not with them. A great many people, and no grandmother. He retraced his steps to the door they had come through in their excitement.

She never said a word about it — not then, not afterwards. She did not have to. His mother had told him dozens of times to hold the door, and he had heard her every time, and usually did it. But the Smithsonian, at that age, is difficult to walk into.

He tries to always hold the door now. He does not always manage it. He thinks of his grandmother every time he forgets, which is thirty-odd years of a lesson that was delivered without a sentence.

What the eight-year-old would make of it

The skier Eileen Gu, asked at the 2026 Winter Olympics whether she thinks before she speaks, gave an answer that states the principle better than Hare has ever managed:

She went on to describe treating her own thinking the way she treats her sport — analyzing it, modifying it, tinkering the way a scientist tinkers rather than out of ego — and said the real measure is whether your younger self would be proud of who you have become.

That is what happened here, deliberately and over decades. Hare made his brain into what it is, and it made him into who he is. By the measure Gu proposes, the eight-year-old would be proud.

So were his grandparents and his parents — including through the long stretches when he did not talk much. A boy quiet enough that being proud of him took some looking, in a house where the adults looked.

Some things can only be arranged

That is the most durable thing she taught him, and the way she taught it is the point. A lecture would have been forgotten inside a week. A woman standing quietly at a door, while a boy works out for himself what he has just done, is permanent.

It is worth stating plainly here because it explains a good deal about how Hare communicates, and about why people close to him sometimes find him difficult to follow. He tends to leave things where they can be found rather than explaining them, which works beautifully when the frame is available and not at all when it is not. An unexplained signal is a mirror; people see themselves in it. The frame is what turns it back into a message.

This site is an attempt to supply the frame — not to tell anyone what to conclude, but to leave enough of the record in the open that the conclusions become available. Which is, in the end, the same thing his grandmother did at that door.

Once

Hare met his grandfather once that he remembers, at his Uncle Red's place in Three Rivers. They watched each other from across the room. The boy read a book on Roman history — the kind with illustrations — and the old man watched him read it.

The grandfather had helped save the world from the Nazis, and then from the Soviets. The grandson would have to save it from whatever came next. There is one in every generation. Hare's father spent his working life helping save the world from the military-industrial complex his own father had helped build — ironic, and necessary, and probably the first thing that made unification feel urgent rather than academic. In March 1965 he drove 2,300 miles in 44 hours to march from Selma to Montgomery, and photographed it from the front of the column. That record is here.

That may be the genesis of the whole thing: three generations, three threats, and the growing suspicion that they were not three problems but one, and that none of them would be solved until somebody joined them up.

He was a loner, and very busy, and doing important work until the day he died — of a fatal stroke while playing tennis on a hot summer's day in Washington, when Hare was perhaps thirteen. With today's cardiovascular care it would have been a minor scare.

He never said a word to his grandson about any of it. Everything Hare knows, he knows because June told him. After the funeral she began visiting a great deal more.

Her house in south-east Washington was walking distance from the Air and Space Museum — Hare and his brothers walked it a dozen times on their first visit to the city. The Smithsonian is free, and Air and Space is every boy's dream. It was Esther Dyson's too.

Esther Dyson, and how he got in

Hare met Esther Dyson at PC Forum around 1996, while at Evolve Software, and again at the Santa Fe Institute where she was a long-serving trustee. Her father Freeman Dyson was a leading physicist who worked on Project Orion, the nuclear-pulse propulsion design; her older brother George wrote the book about it.

He met hundreds of people at her conferences. They were priced to keep out the riff-raff — five to seven thousand dollars a head in today's money, with a significant other admitted to dinners and recreational events for another one or two thousand, depending on the resort and the extras. It was supposedly a considerable honor to be admitted at his age.

He loved a stage. Evolve was not yet successful enough for Esther to put him on the main one.

What the rooms were actually for

Shawn Fanning. The twenty-year-old founder of Napster keynoted at the height of its disruption of the music industry. Intrigued by the peer-to-peer implementation — popular with teenagers and older fans who could not afford egregiously overpriced music — Hare searched the entire conference until he found Fanning at a small hotel bar. They were equally mystified by the culture and demographics of an elite tech conference, being possibly the only two objectively cool people in attendance.

Bob Metcalfe, and the blender. The founder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet had bet years earlier that the internet would collapse under capacity constraints — a bet made, one presumes, with someone who recognized the core protocols as a self-organizing adaptive system that would degrade gracefully rather than fail. He printed the quotation, put it in a blender with water, and drank his words in front of two thousand executives and luminaries. Hare was among the few who had to look up the reference.

Larry Tesler, and The Magic Forest. Met at a lunch table — the same table at which Hare met Doug Merritt. Tesler was among the architects of the modern interface at Xerox PARC and Apple, most associated with cut, copy and paste, modeless editing, and the Smalltalk and Lisa work. It emerged over lunch that he had lived on the same Marxist-Leninist hippie commune in southern Oregon where Hare spent summers and Christmas breaks with his father between the ages of eight and twelve — near Medford, not far from Cave Junction, at Takilma. It was called The Magic Forest, named for its principal crop.

Jane Metcalfe — no relation to Bob — who founded Wired with Louis Rossetto, and through whom Hare probably met John Battelle. Hare flirted with her far above his league and was rebuffed with more grace than he deserved. It has been a running joke for thirty years.

John Battelle and Tim O'Reilly. Both friends of the period; Hare saw them at PC Forum, All Things Digital, Agenda and the rest. Battelle was close to Narry Singh, Hare's best friend of those years. O'Reilly was known mostly through Esther Dyson, and worked in Sebastopol, just north of Hare's high-school home of Petaluma and Santa Rosa.

The lineage Hare met at Consilient

Vinod Khosla, a Stanford GSB student, was Sun's founding chief executive, and hired Scott McNealy early. His chief contribution was persuading Andy Bechtolsheim to join as a co-founder rather than merely licensing his workstation design, since that design was the key differentiator over DEC and the rest. Bill Joy handled the operating system, converting BSD Unix into Sun's.

The combination produced the tagline that defined the company — the network is the computer — and let Sun leapfrog DEC's VAX, HP's minicomputers and IBM's in the scientific and technical market. Khosla had co-founded Daisy Systems, which made electronic design automation workstations, before Sun.

Hare met Bechtolsheim, Eric Schmidt and most of Sun's senior leadership while at Consilient, and spoke on numerous panels with Schmidt up to 2001.

Friends, investors, and one office twice

Frank Caufield, one of Kleiner Perkins' named founding partners, was a genuine personal friend — a rarity on Sand Hill Road — and came to Hare's parties at 3040 Steiner, usually with John Hummer of Hummer Winblad.

Hummer Winblad. Hummer introduced Hare to Ann Winblad — or possibly Heidi Roizen did; the record should say it is uncertain rather than guess. Hare met the firm at least twenty times across all its San Francisco offices. The one near South Park was later occupied by NEA, and became his regular meeting office after NEA invested in WebShield in 2017, until COVID closed it.

Andrew Anker, founder of HotWired, met when he was a partner at August Capital — founded by Hare's mentor David Marquardt.

The Haseltines. Bill Haseltine keynoted one of the last PC Forums Esther held in Phoenix; his Harvard and Dana-Farber laboratory did major work on HIV's regulatory genes and replication, and he went on to lead Human Genome Sciences. He was extraordinarily well connected, and students and colleagues who founded major companies brought him in as a co-founder because of it. He was a friend of Jay Short, chief executive of Diversa, and quietly minded that Short never put him on that board — which puzzled Hare, since Human Genome Sciences was the higher-profile company by some distance. A small observation about how status works among people who have plenty of it.

Bill introduced Hare to his brother Eric Haseltine, who had been Associate Director for Science and Technology at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, overseeing all eighteen agencies. Eric joined the board of Resilient Network Systems as chief scientist around 2007 or 2008 — to give the company, as he put it, street cred and a fighting chance. Hare stayed at Bill's house in Georgetown during that period; Eric's room was on the second floor just off the stairway, Hare's on the third. Eric did not sleep much. He is gregarious and universally liked, and his role was to inspire and to curate rather than to direct.

Neither brother introduced Hare to their sister Florence Haseltine, whom he met independently through mutual friends at the National Institutes of Health, and who became the closest of the three. A physician and physicist who founded the Society for Women's Health Research and directed the Center for Population Research at NICHD, she is arguably the most accomplished of the family by the measure that counts most: she forced clinical research to include women as subjects, which changed medicine for half the population. Hare stayed at her apartment, with her and her husband the physicist Alan Chodos, at least fifty nights. Brilliant, accomplished, hilarious, connected and generous — and thirty years his senior, which stopped nothing.

Five PhDs and no clearance

Eric Haseltine joined the board after Hare presented the invention to him and five of his colleagues — doctorates in cryptography, networking, mathematics, linguistics, probably physics. They challenged him with every exploit they could think of, framed in the abstract, because Hare held no security clearance. The questions were cold: he had no knowledge of the techniques then known only to the National Security Agency, most of which have since been leaked and are now available for nothing from any open-weight model.

Martin Hellman had explained the mathematics to him in 2003, and Hellman's protégé Dan Boneh had explained how cryptographers used it. Eric Haseltine, by Hare's account, understood the invention in those years better than anyone else. He rated ideas on a scale from insane but possible to provably impossible, and prioritized the former — because that is where zero-day exploits come from.

What the money was raised on

Tens of millions were raised against a platform play: Adaptive Applications, Organic Technology and Business DNA — an attempt to leapfrog SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and the rest of the traditional enterprise application vendors by building systems that could evolve rather than systems that had to be reimplemented.

A syndicated ten-million-dollar convertible debt round from European investors followed — the first major financing led by Index Ventures, then the newly formed early-stage unit of Index Capital, a boutique public equity firm in Europe.

Easy to execute, lucrative, and unable to adapt

Hare concluded that a major pivot was necessary, and executed one: hard, away from the platform and into a vertical application solution. It defined a new category — Supply Chain for Services — with a product called ServiceSphere.

It worked. The revenue ramp was impressive and it carried the company to an initial public offering. It was also, by Hare's own assessment, the wrong trade: short-term lucrative, straightforward to execute, and dangerously unable to adapt to changing market demand — which is precisely the failure mode the abandoned platform existed to prevent.

The IPO, and what happened to it

The offering was originally underwritten by CSFB and Deutsche Bank for May 2000: two hundred million dollars raised at a targeted five-billion-dollar valuation, according to the comparables of the moment.

It did not happen in May. It was delayed by what Hare regards as ill-advised and damaging manoeuvring by the H&Q staff who had replaced Bill Hambrecht on Evolve's board, and pushed to August 2000 — a fifty-million-dollar raise, peaking shortly after the close at around two billion. It was among the last three software IPOs of the internet bubble.

What followed was not company-specific. Technology sector valuations fell, and after the attacks of 11 September the eBusiness integrator market — Scient, Viant, MarchFirst, iXL and their peers — was killed off entirely, taking the customer base with it. Evolve's stock declined precipitously, and Hare's net worth and disposable income went with it.

Evolve was acquired by Oracle at a distress valuation. EDS, an anchor client, was what kept it viable as a going concern through the collapse — which is why the core team stayed together at Oracle while the original investors were crushed. That is the honored tradition of most moderately successful enterprise software companies: the people land, the capital does not.

He heard it. He refused it.

Hare's underwriter lock-up had come off, and Deutsche Bank Alex Brown sold much of his position into margin calls against his outstanding loans. He fought it mightily.

He fought it partly on an inference he had no business drawing. Sitting with Adam Dell and a few friends in New York, Dell had mentioned in passing that a hundred million was the minimum he personally needed — to be precise, the minimum for sustainable helicopter and fractional jet ownership, provided you did not squander too much of it on real estate. It was an observation about his own arrangements, not counsel. Adam Dell was right. Hare was the one who turned a remark into a reason to hold on.

Asked whether there was any way to block a forced margin sale, Russ DeLeon — in-house counsel, and therefore holding information he could not disclose — observed casually that in this market, they might be doing him a favor.

It is easy to call a market shift in the rear-view mirror. At the time he wanted to believe the bubble would reflate, and he believed the internet was essential to what he was actually trying to do — which was the founding premise of Consilient and remains the premise of everything here. Founders give up last. It is in the DNA. If you fear the future you never start, so he had trained himself from the beginning to ignore fear, which is close to a professional obligation when there is no safe landing available.

So for one of the few times in his life he did not even try to think it through. He told Russ: Evolve or die. I meant it. I don't give up on my babies.

What being rich was like

Briefly, and on a credit line from Deutsche Bank Alex Brown, he experienced life as a successful internet entrepreneur with everything that involves. First-class travel. Luxury accommodation. Speedboats. St. Barts for the turn of the millennium.

So he knows what it is like to be rich. It is a good life.

The relevance is not nostalgia. Two things on this site depend on it: that he has been on the receiving end of everyone asking for an introduction, a check or an hour — which is why he does not hold it against anyone who stopped answering — and that he knows exactly what he is choosing against by continuing to do this the hard way.

A chalet, a painting, and an invitation

The European financing brought him to a country chalet outside Amsterdam — to Hare's eye a Dutch palace in miniature, built in the 1500s and furnished and hung to the standard the Dutch of that era were famous for. Two dozen prospective investors were assembled inside. Searching for small talk before the pitch, he mentioned his family lineage to the owner.

The line runs, by family account, to William of Orange — on the illegitimate side. The Prince was a well-known playboy and his marriage was a political one; Hare's ancestors, being love children, were shipped out of the Netherlands where the Prince's mistresses lived, and sent to the colony at Baltimore speaking Dutch rather than English. The same line is held to run back to Charlemagne and to Cromwell.

He took Hare to another palatial room and showed him a fifteen-foot painting of William astride a rearing horse, poised as if for battle — the equal of the ones Hare had admired in Amsterdam, on the same floor as The Night Watch, except that this one hung in the house of something like a fifteenth cousin twice removed.

The conversation ran long and became a mentorship. The elder relative invited him to join, later that summer, aboard his sailing yacht moored in the Seychelles — a single-masted vessel of perhaps a hundred and thirty feet, identical, he mentioned, to the one owned by his good friend Tom Perkins, of Kleiner Perkins.

Hare said he would love to, and asked whether he might bring his friend Frank Caufield.

How it started, and the odd share

While Hare was away on one of his round-the-world sabbaticals, Eric Freed — his former chief technology officer at Evolve — started a one-person company called Infocanvas. It replicated a portion of the original Evolve vision, Organic Technology and Business DNA, and extended its asynchronous, loosely coupled, fine-grained object persistence model into something they came to call Sitelets: small portable agents that could run either in a browser or inside an HTML email client, which was a genuinely new capability at the time.

Freed had never raised financing for a startup. When Hare returned from his trip, Freed offered him half the company to come in as chief executive. That was an odd arrangement by Hare's own standards — at Evolve he had held ninety percent of the stock when he and Larry Sonsini first incorporated it as Cortez Software International.

Renamed Consilient, in order to reach Wilson, it reached roughly a hundred people and was — in late 2000 — virtually the only software company still ramping up.

Three mentors, one board

Michael Spence, then Dean of Stanford Graduate School of Business and a partner at Oak Hill, took the title of Vice Chairman to help with ecosystem development. Mark Wolfson, one of Hare's principal mentors at the GSB and at Cornerstone Research and a former Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, was the second. Myron Scholes, his primary mentor in financial markets, was the third — the Nobel laureate whose option-valuation equation turned derivatives into actual markets, and which is arguably the most consequential financial innovation of the last century.

Fifteen million at a hundred and thirty

A term sheet arrived from Société Générale's venture unit: fifteen million dollars at a hundred and thirty-five million pre-money — a hundred and fifty million post. It would have converted the five-million-dollar convertible note from Oak Hill Venture Partners on the way through.

The arithmetic was exceptional, particularly for the moment. It would have meant raising the first twenty million dollars for total dilution under fifteen percent — not bad in an era when valuations were nowhere near as frothy as they later became, and remarkable given that the technology sector was already in a tailspin.

Ray Lane, and the Tier 1 dream

Just before closing the Société Générale round he came to know Ray Lane, formerly President of Oracle and newly a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Lane was a complexity enthusiast of the Aspen Institute variety — more business leaders than scientists — and had brought a team of former Oracle technology executives across as venture partners to handle technical diligence and staff startups.

Lane also knew the chief executives of every one of Consilient's major clients: Lord John Browne at BP, and the leadership at Intel and AIG. Hare began imagining what it would be like to have a Tier 1 firm behind him.

The lesson, stated plainly: a bird in the hand from a boutique European investor was worth considerably more than the prospect of a marquee name, in a market that was closing. He had a closeable round with exceptional terms and he set it aside for something better that did not arrive in time.

The bridge, the BP deal, and the silver bullet

Having passed on Société Générale, Hare then faced an offer from Oak Hill of five million as a convertible note at a fifteen-million valuation — which would have heavily diluted the common shareholders. He blocked it by lending the company one and a half million himself, in a note senior to Oak Hill's existing five million from the previous year, funded by a margin loan from DB Alex Brown against Evolve stock that was still under lock-up.

He raised roughly another one and a half million from a dozen angels, employees and friends, offering personal guarantees to move quickly. The burn rate was close to a million a month and he needed to buy time. Those are the guarantees that were called after September 11th, and that he honored.

What he was buying time for was a strategic deal with BP, sponsored by Lord John Browne: a ten-million lead investment in a crowdsourcing model to develop solutions on the Consilient platform. That is the Accelerator model, twenty-five years early, proposed by a major industrial company in 2001.

It was a right they had requested at their original investment and Hare had agreed to: the ability to replace him as chief executive at any time, for any reason or none, with him remaining as Executive Chairman. The stated understanding was that it would install a seasoned operating executive once the company was ramping. Ray Conley, Oak Hill's junior partner, stepped in — younger than Hare, and in Hare's phrase at the time, a man who had never operated a popsicle stand.

Exercising it was not a breach. He had signed it, and there was nothing he could do.

What followed is why Hare records it as a structural failure rather than a personal one. Conley told the assembled staff — over a hundred people, in an era when headcount itself was the signal of a good deal — that he would pitch every venture firm in the valley. Hare went out to do vision work: the Santa Fe Institute, then Boston, David Yoffie at Harvard and John Clippinger and others at the MIT Media Lab.

Three months later, with the bridge running out, Conley returned with no term sheets and a plan to lay off almost everyone and restart. Hare returned with a signed, committed ten-million round at a fifty-million valuation on a weighted-average ratchet — standard Series B terms. He was no longer chief executive and could not sign it.

By his account, Oak Hill went back to the investor and required a full ratchet instead: the downside of a convertible note, with the upside capped at fifty million. He protested in writing and warned of the legal exposure of leaving an executive with a conflicting personal incentive in the chair. The terms were changed anyway.

The conflict is a property of the capital structure rather than an allegation about anyone's intentions. A holder of an uncapped convertible note with no floor, plus anti-dilution protection, participation rights, and the contractual power to install the chief executive, is better off at a lower valuation — whoever holds it and whatever they intend. Consilient subsequently went bankrupt, and these matters were examined in the litigation that followed, by counsel on more than one side.

Hare's contention is that the fault sits in the incentive structure rather than in the people operating under it — and that the structure was a reasonable attempt at a real problem. Professional money management has an asymmetry at its center: limited partners carry the downside while managing partners take a share of the upside, on capital that is not theirs. Oak Hill's model is old-fashioned and addresses it directly — the principal lends the money and the partners hold real, recourse exposure. That is genuine skin in the game.

It cuts both ways. A partner carrying personal exposure behaves better than a carried-interest partner in ordinary conditions and worse in extreme ones, because the downside becomes existential rather than notional. The principal almost certainly had no visibility into a company this small.

Ray Conley was twenty-nine. Hare's own assessment: one of the smartest and nicest people I've ever met — but he got in over his head, the market collapsed, and he got desperate and did desperate things. Everyone in technology and venture was desperate in the spring of 2001.

It is also the same claim this architecture makes about everything else: enforcement regimes are negotiable, evadable and capturable, and gradients are not. The full argument — and the Spence loop it closes →

Dozens of meetings, and one CTO

Hare held dozens of meetings with the information-technology leadership of the national intelligence agencies. Among them was Gus Hunt, long-serving chief technology officer of the CIA, who led the agency's commercial cloud initiative.

Hunt's decision there is worth recording, because it was contrarian at the time and correct in hindsight. The default was to hand the work to the beltway contractors — SAIC, Booz Allen, Northrop Grumman and their peers — who would have spent a great deal of money building a cloud facility that was less secure, less scalable and completely foreign to the technical talent the agency needed to attract.

It is the same judgement Hare had made from the other direction: that the platform is the thing, and that renting a capability built by people who build capabilities for a living beats constructing a worse one in-house. Recorded here as his account of those meetings.

The bridge, and the guarantees

With the market turning, Consilient raised a convertible bridge. Hare subscribed $1.5 million of it himself, borrowed against his still-locked-up Evolve Software holdings, and a number of individuals invested alongside him. Because several were unsophisticated investors, he personally guaranteed a comparable amount of their money. The purpose was to buy time to raise a proper round on better terms.

The round, and the advice

The time bought was sufficient. A ten-million-dollar convertible note was raised from a public equity firm whose principal Hare had met at the Santa Fe Institute and who had been drawn in by the consilient thesis rather than by the product. Every institutional investor converted into the new terms.

The individual bridge investors asked him what they should do. He told them not to convert — Consilient still faced serious risks, and they would be better served remaining in a more senior instrument and retaining the benefit of his personal guarantee.

That belief is the point rather than an excuse. The choice was not a heroic gesture made in a crisis, which can be performed. It was a reflexive answer given in an ordinary meeting, which cannot.

What it cost

Following the attacks of 11 September, General Electric exited venture investing and the August financing failed. Consilient did not survive. The guarantees given in December and reaffirmed by the April advice were called, Hare honored them, and he went from a net worth in the tens of millions to nothing. The individuals were made whole. The noteholders are living and can confirm all of this.

The same collapse ended the foundation Hare and Wilson had agreed to launch in 1999, which Hare had intended to fund himself. Evolve Software was sold in the same period at a fraction of its former value. Nothing was left with which to endow anything, and the plan lapsed.