He has built founding teams since before "founder" was a job title. Now he does it on purpose.
Call Web Augustine when you have a great idea, a founding team of two, and no clue who your fifth hire should be. HiWire, the Menlo Park firm he founds and runs, does retained executive search for early-stage companies - the kind of high-touch CEO-and-VP recruiting the big firms reserve for clients with deep pockets, delivered instead at terms a startup can actually sign. He also writes your business plan, pressure-tests your financial forecasts, and tells you whether your deck will survive a real partner meeting. Forty years in, the man who staffed Silicon Valley's last era is busy staffing its next one.
The through-line is not a job. It is a habit. Augustine keeps walking into rooms that are about to become important and helping the people in them figure out what they are building.
In 1980 that room was a 40-person startup division of Hewlett-Packard in Vancouver, Washington. He became the first product manager on an inkjet program nobody had heard of yet. It grew into the DeskJet franchise, and the division grew past 3,000 people.
In September 1983 the room was Sun Microsystems, where he arrived as employee 152 and only the second hardware-oriented product manager on staff. He took over the Sun-2 and Sun-3 workstation lines back when Sun was in a knife fight with Apollo Computer for the future of the workstation.
By 1995 the room was a small security outfit inside RSA. Augustine co-wrote the business plan, led the effort to spin it out as a standalone company, and raised a $5.3M Series A from Visa, Intel, Mitsubishi and Bessemer Venture Partners. The company was VeriSign. He was its founding VP of marketing and business development, and he drew the early product and market map that the internet's trust layer would follow.
Then DigiCash, where he was acting VP of marketing for eight months and wrote the plan - selling digital cash to the world years before anyone said the word crypto with a straight face.
From 1997 to 2005 he ran Strategic Web Ventures, his own consultancy, doing interim marketing leadership and fundraising help for emerging Bay Area companies. The pattern was set: show up early, do the unglamorous parts, leave the company sturdier than you found it.
It's too preposterous to be true. Almost.- Web Augustine, on his own political satire
Joins a 40-person HP division in Vancouver, WA. First product manager on the inkjet line that becomes DeskJet.
Sun Microsystems, employee #152. Runs product for the Sun-2 and Sun-3 workstation families.
Co-writes the plan and helps spin out VeriSign. Raises a $5.3M Series A. Becomes founding VP of marketing and BizDev.
Acting VP of marketing at DigiCash for eight months. Writes the business plan for digital cash.
Founds and runs Strategic Web Ventures - interim marketing and fundraising help for Bay Area startups.
Founds HiWire to bring retained executive search to early-stage companies at founder-friendly terms.
Publishes Inspiring Quotations of Our Times, a collection of roughly 1,400 quotations.
Restarts HiWire with a wider menu: recruiting, sourcing, product planning and fundraising.
Publishes the political satire Make Our Country YUUUGE Again through Bublish.
The biggest search firms ignore early-stage founders, and most boutiques do too - the checks are small and the work is hard. Augustine built HiWire to do exactly that work, well, for the companies everyone else passes on. He founded it in 2006, wound it down, and restarted it in 2015 when the founders kept calling.
The pitch is range. You can hire HiWire to find a CEO. You can also hire it to write the plan that convinces investors the CEO is worth backing.
A political farce narrated by press secretary Laira Succupy Ganders, chronicling the "Tunnald Drump" administration in the nation of Cameria. Augustine renames the entire cast by reversing letters and bending spellings, then lets the docu-comedy run.
A curated stack of roughly 1,400 quotations on life, love, attitude, happiness, success and character - the kind of book that sits by the door and gets opened at random.