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.
H&Q offered us a $15m pre-money valuation with some warrants attached, and Benchmark offered us $8m pre-money if I recall. Benchmark was only an $80m fund. I was concerned they wouldn't be able to afford a stepped-up Series B round — plus, the partner was Val Vaden, who was a turnaround guy, and also was always trying to insert himself in my deals.
He showed up unannounced at my meeting with David Marquardt to fund Evolve (not yet formed) at the City Club in SF, because I had introduced Val to David. And I was bringing the whole core tech team from Tesseract over to launch Evolve. I was afraid it would trigger litigation from Ceridian, who acquired Tesseract, making Val his first big money.
Val was very stubborn. He once lost a game of chicken with a city bus trying to squeeze into the Broadway tunnel, with me in the car.
Corrections applied downstream are recorded here rather than made silently. The source above is unaltered.
This corrects an earlier account in source record S-032, which had the two offers reversed. It also resolves a flagged inconsistency: Val Vaden's several roles in this record — Stanford classmate, Tesseract VP of marketing and board member, and Benchmark partner — form a single career arc rather than a contradiction.
Benchmark's first fund, raised in 1995, was approximately $85m, which is consistent with the author's recollection of an $80m fund.
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.
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Correct or extend S-033 → All source records →