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.
Add a record for Dan Case who worked for Hambrecht & Quist. I met him because he led a due diligence on Evolve that led to their investment — we got Bill Hambrecht on the board as a trophy. Our other offer was from Benchmark, led by Val Vaden, so they offered us close to double the valuation, and Bill Hambrecht as our board member.
Dan Case died of brain cancer very young. Add him, because I later got introduced to his brother Steve Case, who founded AOL, by Bill Hambrecht, and met with him and John Pleasants at Revolution Health, when that was first launched. I think John Pleasants was the President or CEO, and Steve Case was the Chairman. John came from Ticketmaster and its parent company — the one owned by Barry Diller. My friend Thomas Stockham (of Stanford GSB, and Scott Sandell's mentor) used to work for John Pleasants, so he got looped in. John later became head of a children's gaming group for Disney.
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
Research confirmations. Daniel H. Case III: Princeton 1979, Rhodes Scholar, entire career at Hambrecht & Quist, chief executive at thirty-six, took H&Q public in 1996 and merged it with Chase in 1999. Died 27 June 2002 aged forty-four of glioblastoma. He joined H&Q in 1979 after Bill Hambrecht asked Princeton's faculty to nominate the school's smartest student for a summer internship. In January 1983 he introduced his brother Steve to Bill von Meister of Control Video Corporation, which became AOL. He founded Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure with Steve in his final year.
Revolution Health Group launched July 2005 with Steve Case as chairman; John Pleasants was named chief executive in September 2005, from Ticketmaster and IAC — Barry Diller's company — where he had run Match.com, Evite and CitySearch. The board of investor-directors included Colin Powell, Carly Fiorina, Frank Raines, Jim Barksdale and Miles Gilburne. Pleasants later ran Playdom, acquired by Disney in 2010, and was co-president of Disney Interactive Media Group from October 2010, overseeing the games business including Club Penguin. So the author's recollection is accurate throughout.
Corrected 14 August 2026, and the Vaden question resolved. The offers were the other way round: H&Q offered $15m pre-money with warrants attached; Benchmark offered $8m pre-money. So H&Q was the higher valuation as well as the better name, and an earlier version of this record had it reversed.
The Vaden roles reconcile into one arc: Stanford GSB classmate, then VP of marketing and board member at Tesseract where he hired Hare, then — having made his first serious money on Tesseract's sale to Ceridian — a partner at Benchmark, where he led the losing offer for Evolve. See source record S-033.
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