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.
I only relented when the cap table of Consilient (the original one) after I made a much bigger blunder, probably my biggest financial blunder. I foolishly passed on a $15m $130m valuation termsheet from Society General's venture unit. Just as we were preparing to close it, which would have converted a $5m convertible note from Oak Hill Venture Partners, which would have been quite an achievement - meaning I would have raised the first $20m for a total dilution of under 15%. Not bad at all in those days, when valuations weren't nearly as frothy as they are today.
Once I renamed Infocanvas (which is what my former CTO of Evolve, Eric Freed, named his one-person startup when I was taking one of my round the world sabbaticals. He basically replicated a portion of the original Evolve Organic Technology and Business DNA vision, and extended its asynchronous, loosely coupled, fine-grained object persistence model architecture into what we called 'Sitelets', little portable agents that could run either in browsers or HTML email clients, which was a cool new capability in those days.
Erik had never raised financing for a startup before, so when I came back from my latest trip, he offered me a 50% share of the startup as CEO. This was weird, because at Evolve I was the primary founder since I had 90% of the stock, when Larry Sonsini and I first incorporated Evolve, which was originally called Cortez Software International.
Just before I closed the Society Generale round, which would have secured us enough runway and preserved enough cap-table space for Consilient (which was by that time approaching 100 people), I got to know Ray Lane, formerly the President of Oracle who had just joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers as a Partner. Ray Lane was a complexity aficionado (of the Aspen Institute variety - more business leaders than scientists). Suffice to say, his team of ex-Oracle tech execs he brought over as Venture Partners to KPCB to handle tech due-diligence and staff startups, I started dreaming of what it would be like to have a Tier 1 venture firm as a backer. Also, Ray knew the CEOs of all of Consilient's major clients - Lord John Browne at BP, Intel, AIG, etc. Consilient was virtually the only software company which was ramping up during late 2000.
Each page below is a distillation of the account above. The chain is recorded in both directions so that a reader, a journalist or a future system can walk from a claim back to what was actually said.
A source record can be wrong about the world even when it accurately preserves what was said. Corrections are recorded alongside rather than replacing it — nothing here is overwritten.
Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly — both are on the button — or use the structured contribution form. A timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record.
Correct or extend S-008 → All source records →