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.
He sat next to me in one of our classes. He was much older than everybody else.
The thing about Harvard is — Stanford sort of coddles people. Our class gave out a T-shirt with a dictionary definition that said: Stanford Graduate School of Business, a two-year vacation. The signal was: hey, we had to fight to get in here, clawing your way to the top to get into Stanford Business School, which of course was the ultimate. And for once in your life, since this is the end of the academic train — learn to collaborate. Learn to cooperate. No more backstabbing.
So Stanford had grades. You could have an H for honours, a P or a P+ or a P−, and a fail. You weren't allowed to report them. Recruiters weren't allowed to ask — if a recruiter asked your grades in an on-campus interview, they'd be banished from doing on-campus interviews. They didn't report first-year honours like Harvard does, because they wanted people to cooperate rather than compete to be number one. And they didn't release your grades until after you graduated.
So folks like McKinsey spent half their time trying to figure out who the Arjay Miller Scholars were — the top of the class.
It was designed to make people collegial. Harvard was the opposite. They had first-year honours. They 'looped out', as they called it — basically failed out ten per cent of the class after the first year. It was just like you might as well be working at Goldman Sachs.
So anyway, Val Vaden was at Harvard —
[Continued] The reason they sent out the T-shirt — Stanford Graduate School of Business, a two-year vacation — was an explicit signal to chill out, not work too hard. A sort of non-competition statement, a non-aggression pact among everybody. I don't know who came up with it. I suspect it was Sheila Benini, because her father was the associate dean of students or something. This was during intro week when everybody's just getting to know each other.
There was a pretty strong cultural thing not to be competitive. And I came from UC Berkeley in engineering, and we worked hard. Really hard. We had all of two electives in the entire four years of school, and that's only if you had advanced placement courses that let you skip the usual freshman stuff. It was just brutal. We had a forced curve — if the average GPA was more than—
[On Val Vaden] He ended up hiring me at Tesseract, after I finished at Blyth Software. So he was my boss after we left business school. I'll fill out that story later.
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
Resolved 13 August 2026. Checked against Stanford's own records: the designation is Arjay Miller Scholars, named for the school's fourth dean, and covers the academically highest ten per cent of the graduating MBA class. Hare's 1994 resume describes it as the top 1%; that is superseded. The Henry Ford II Scholar is the single highest student in the class.
Still incomplete. The dictation breaks off twice — once mid-sentence on the Berkeley forced curve, and once before the Val Vaden story is told. What is recorded of Vaden so far: he hired Hare at Tesseract after Blyth Software, and so became his boss after business school.
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