The account as dictated, preserved verbatim. Everything elsewhere on this site that derives from it is a distillation — and where the two differ, this governs.
Dictated by Jonathan Paul Hare in working sessions with Claude (Anthropic) and transcribed in-session. Lightly cleaned for typographic errors and false starts; wording, sequence and emphasis preserved. Not an audio transcript. Where the distilled page differs from the source, the source governs.
The first several companies I founded, it appeared that I swung and missed. Evolve Software went public, but only August of 2000, among the last three software IPOs of the Internet bubble. Hare recognized that a major pivot was necessary after closing a syndicated $10m convertible debt round from European Investors, actually the first major financing led by Index Ventures, the newly formed early stage unit of Index Capital, which was a boutique public equity firm in Europe. After raising the tens of millions based on a futuristic Adaptive Applications, Organic Technology, Business DNA platform play positioned as an attempt to leapfrog SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft and other traditional enterprise application players - laying the foundation for Consilience, pivoting hard to a vertical application solution play (aka, easy to execute, short-term lucrative, dangerously unable to adapt to changing markets demand). They defined a new category called Supply-Chain for Services, with a product called ServiceSphere. This lead to an impressive revenue ramp, and eventually an IPO that was originally underwritten by CSFB and DeutscheBank for a May 2000 IPO raising $200m at a targeted $5b valuation (according to valuation comps), but was delayed due to some highly ill-advised and damaging maneuverings by the H&Q staff who replaced Bill Hambrecht on the Evolve's Board, pushing it back to August 2000, with a reduced $50m raise that hit a peak of a $2b valuation shortly after the close.
Evolve Software was acquired by Oracle at a distress valuation after 9/11 completely killed off the e-business integrator market. EDS was an anchor client of Evolve, which gave it ongoing viability as a going concern, so the core team at evolve remained together at Oracle, while the original investors got crushed. Fortunately, Hare's underwriter lock-up had come off, and DB Alex Brown had sold much of his position based on margin calls against his outstanding loans. Hare fought this mightily because his friend Adam Dell (Michael Dell's brother, who Hare had met at the Santa Fe Institute a few years before) advised him that the minimum tolerable net worth for an internet founder was $100m.
I heard what Russ was saying, but I didn't want to believe it. It's easy to call market shifts in the rear view mirror. I wanted to believe that the Internet bubble would reflate. I believed the Internet was essential to my plans to save the world, the very premise of the original Consilient. Founders give up last, it's in our DNA. If you fear the future, you never start. I had trained myself since inception to ignore fear - it is almost a responsibility of a startup founder, because there is no safe landing for a startup. When Russ gave that subtle hint that Hare should just let DB Alex Brown sell his founders share at what might be the bottom of the market, for one of the few times in my life, I didn't even try to think it through. I told Russ - 'Evolve, or Die! I meant what I said. I never give up on my babies!'
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
Adam Dell's remark was later corrected by Hare: it was an observation about his own arrangements, not advice, and the inference drawn from it was Hare's own.
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