Berkeley, Impell, Cornerstone, Stanford GSB, Microsoft — how a commune boy grew a network of mentors and institutions.
This topic carries part of the argument of the Consilient Manifesto — the universal call to action. ← Back to the call
Berkeley's imaginary engineers taught me to design systems rather than things, and my advisors handed me Hinton's back-propagation paper when the field barely existed. Impell taught me redundancy by making me write nuclear-plant safety software. At Cornerstone, at twenty-two, I contradicted Myron Scholes in front of a full conference room — and he said I was right, which is how a thirteen-year mentorship began.
Stanford put me in the first class Andy Grove taught, got me the nickname, and — through a class project I took because I did not know what a venture capitalist was — put me inside Microsoft's Building 1, where I named the Business Process Abstraction Layer and gave up the Henry Ford II prize for it. The pattern of this phase is the one the whole record turns on: at every institution, people with reputations spent them on me. This network is the asset everything since was built with — and the one the cascade now runs through.
Enter through Berkeley vs Stanford, the résumé in the wrong pile, or feature vectors before the field.
One graph, four projections — the story where this was learned, the invention that delivers it, the vision claim it serves, and what it becomes in the Era of Abundance.
The mechanism that makes a network navigable — learned first by growing one person by person.
Open →The Grand VisionEvery door here was opened by someone spending reputation. The vision is that the next founder needs no such loan.
Open →The CascadeThe network grown in this phase is the asset the cascade now runs through — mentors, institutions, and their ecosystems.
Open →Era of AbundanceFunding on the strength of verifiable contribution rather than introductions — the phase's lesson, made structural.
Open →The single most consequential thing in this record happened because a résumé was sorted into the wrong stack. Everything downstream — the adversarial…
Open →Foundations of Networks · Realizing the Grand VisionTwo men in this record each designed something clever enough to defeat them. One structured a transaction so precisely hedged that his own bonus…
Open →Foundations of NetworksTwo institutions took similar people and produced different behavior by changing what they measured and what they showed. Berkeley enforced a 2.7…
Open →Foundations of NetworksThe most productive, highest-quality plant in General Motors' network was the one with the lowest capital investment and no robots — because the…
Open →Foundations of NetworksThe lesson learned doing matrix transformations in APL — that a property which changes under a change of coordinates was never a property of the…
Open →Foundations of NetworksIn his first year at Stanford, Hare's rival for the last parking spots on the Oval was Laurene Powell — a year ahead, driving a red Rabbit cabriolet…
Open →Vice Chairman of Consilient, and the introduction into Cisco
Open →OrganizationThe coffee break room
Open →PersonNuclear physicist, Titan II, ARPA — and a two-hundred-word obituary
Open →PersonBerkeley advisor — and the man who handed him Hinton's paper
Open →PersonPhilosophy against artificial intelligence — and Hare's mother's employer
Open →PersonThe other advisor, and the NeXT machine
Open →PersonSurrogate father, and the punch cards at Evans Hall
Open →OrganizationWhere the deterrent was worked out
Open →Organization“Imaginary engineers” — third floor, Etcheverry Hall
Open →PersonConsilient Architect — the node this graph was seeded from
Open →PersonJune's surrogate daughter — and the friend Hare was closer to than blood
Open →PersonThe class Hare got stuck in, which changed everything
Open →PersonCo-taught the course, and Hare loved him
Open →PersonGave Hare his nickname, and the introduction that started the arc
Open →PersonThe entrepreneurship class Hare could not get into
Open →PersonVisiting from Harvard, and became a mentor
Open →PersonMicrosoft's board, the TOPS study, and the door into everything
Open →Organization1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →Every episode above distills from these. Where a page and its source differ, the source governs.
“[Raw voice dictation, transcribed as spoken, retained unedited for provenance. Speech disfluencies, false starts and…”
Open →In his own words · S-155 · 2026-08-31“[RAW USER SOURCE: Direct Narrative] So when I met with Dave Marquardt, it was in the spring of 1992, whenever we were…”
Open →In his own words · S-068 · 2026-08-17“[Part 1] The prize water horizon story reminds me of another lesson I learned. So when I was at UC Berkeley in the…”
Open →In his own words · S-067 · 2026-08-17“I checked, and according to the records, uh, the the official cost to BP was sixty five billion dollars pretax, uh, but…”
Open →In his own words · S-063 · 2026-08-17“Sandra Smith was a VP at Consilient and worked very closely with me on the BP Account. She was with me in London in…”
Open →In his own words · S-081 · 2026-08-19“Can you review the first attachment, which is the responses from a Google AI / gemini prompts about the relationship of…”
Open →In his own words · S-082 · 2026-08-19“[VERBATIM TRANSCRIPT — three prompts and three responses, Google Gemini, 19 August 2026. Hare's prompts verbatim: (1)…”
Open →In his own words · S-172 · 2026-08-31“**[RAW USER SOURCE: Direct Narrative]** In my first year I often competed for the last parking spots on the Oval with…”
Open →In his own words · S-181 · 2026-08-31“Don't publish my number [phone number withheld by the record — the author's current number; his ruling, S-181] - that's…”
Open →In his own words · S-062 · 2026-08-17“# ARCHIVAL SOURCE RECORD: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NARRATIVE & CONSILIENT SYNTHESIS OF JONATHAN PAUL HARE ## PROVENANCE &…”
Open →The same nodes exist simultaneously in other projections of the one graph. Touching this hub surfaces its correlated partners — follow any of them and the graph re-collapses around it.
Shared with 3 of this hub's episodes.
Open →InstitutionShared with 3 of this hub's episodes.
Open →InstitutionShared with 2 of this hub's episodes.
Open →The CircleShared with 2 of this hub's episodes.
Open →The UniversalsShared with 2 of this hub's episodes.
Open →InstitutionShared with 2 of this hub's episodes.
Open →Every hub is deliberately incomplete. Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim your entry — recorded, timestamped, and attributed to you.