The term sheets of late 2000 — SG Cowen, the wedding circuit, and the analysts

Can you add the context of how I had secured a committed term sheet offer of a $15m Preferred Equity Financing at a $135m pre-money valuation from the venture unit of Society Generale, a french financial institution whose US unit was SG Cowen. The term sheet firmed up sometime in late Fall (discussions started during my trip to London to meet with BP in September, and I toured around Europe meeting with various enterprise customers and financial institutions based on the customer revenue momentum we had Intel, AIG, CIsco, and a $10m pipeline with BP alone, partnerships in the works with CommerceOne, Ariba, SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, ABB, General Electric, buzz among all the top management consulting firms and integrators. Suffice it to say, I was pretty confident I had satisfied the MR-DIBS (Multiple Redundant, Independent, Backup Systems) criteria I developed for resiliency when developing software to manage and assess safety systems for nuclear power plants at Impell Corporation (a unit of Combustion Engineering, subsequently acquired by my friends at ABB in Zurich). Put another way, using a phrase common during the Internet bubble, I became convinced that my shit no longer stank, and I could maneuver through any obstacles that might crop up, as I always had at SPA, Blyth, Tesseract, and Evolve.

There were a bunch of term sheets floating around, and Society Generale's was the first to firm up - I went over to Paris to visit my friend Sheena Singh and her husband Eduarde, a french count (I had been hanging out with her and her fashion industry friends in Paris at the beginning of my sabbatical after Evolve, and then circled the globe the other direction to catch her amazing two week long wedding and post-party in India (200 fashion models, artists, designers, billionaires, members of french, english, german, swiss, and italian nobility and a few princesses and princes and counts, plus the great grand daughter of Bismarck himself as one of my travelling companions). I'll have to review my email archives, but it was somebody from Sheena's circle of friends that made the introduction when I was in London and Paris, or maybe it was when I returned from a Budapest by way of a secret side-trip to Warsaw with a couple of beautiful Polish fashion models that ended up living in my place in San Francisco for way longer than I intended. In any event, term sheets were coming hot and heavy in those days, because the market was hot, my first startup Evolve had just gone public in August (one of the last three tech companies to IPO before the best - and everyone was praying that the bubble would keep on growing. After all, John Doerr assured everyone that it was impossible to overhype the Internet. He was right about that - as long as you invested in Google or Amazon, and could afford to hold on.

I had so many term sheets coming my way, and I was in the process or working on a breakthrough pooled financing model - basically the equivalent of Accelerator Network where enterprises would pool their investments into a primordial many-sided Exchange Networks and Resource Pools (implemented initially with clever legal agreements rather than cryptographically verifiable distributed ledgers - John Brown was the only one who really understood the full transformation potential - but he was the CEO of BP, which had a market cap of about $130B, and $160b+ in revenue, and $14b in profits - I figured I probably should have asked for more than a lead investment of $10m to prime the pump - since it was well below his discretionary spending thresshold. Sir Brown assigned Tony Hayward and John Leggate to help implement that. I was also making the rounds of my friends who were top Wall Street analysts (my personal favorites were Charles Phillips at Morgan Stanley - who later became co-President of Oracle) and Michael Maubissoun, who I knew from the Santa Fe Institute, and who was Chief Investment Strategist of Credit Suisse First Boston. We had all of the top investment banks competing to take Evolve public (Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Deutsche Bank, and the former investment banking teams from Montgomery Securities, Robertson Stephensen, and CSFB).

We ended up going with CSFB, because the legendary Frank Quattrone moved his team from Morgan Stanley over there after Credit Suisse decided to buy its way to the top of US invetment banking indusrtry, who was the lead manager of Evolve's IPO. (Add entries for all of these people). Meanwhile, I had got connected to Ray Lane (then President of Oracle) through some friends I met at a Board of Trustees meeting of the Santa Fe Institute, and learned