Ron Conway born
Ron Conway is born in the Bay Area. He is the sixth child, along with his twin brother, Rick, in an Irish Catholic family of 12 children, six boys and six girls. His father is an executive at the Oakland, Calif.-based American President Lines shipping company, and later starts a business in the shipping container industry. He attends St. Stephen’s and Stuart Hall schools. His twin brother says he was shy when young:
In grammar school, no one would have expected he’d become the mayor of Silicon Valley
Atherton City Council
0 CommentsConway is elected to the City Council. He is attending college and still living with his family, and runs on a two-plank platform of opposing the widening of a major road in an adjoining town, and a raise for local policemen. His father, John:
That was when Ron started building his network.
National Semiconductor
0 CommentsConway starts out in the company’s sales division.
Altos Computer Systems
0 CommentsAltos becomes a co-founder, President and CEO of the company.
Altos IPO
Altos goes public, earning $58.8 million from the sale of common shares.
Starts investing
Conway starts investing with Rosen, who is the chairman of Compaq and has invested in the company via Sevin Rosen. Conway:
We decided we were only going to invest in this thing called the Internet. It’s the most significant decision I made in investing.
Personal Training Systems
Conway invests in the computer training company, and becomes its CEO.
Invests in Google
0 CommentsConway invests in the early stages of the search provider, after meeting Brin and Page at a party in his home town of Atherton, Calif. He joins Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and other angels in the venture round with a $75 million pre-money valuation.
Page rank and relevance really resonated…This is when they were raising a VC round. They said, ‘If you help us get Sequoia, you can invest, because we want to set up a (partnership deal) with Yahoo.’ […] All of us felt lucky to get in. All of this [debate] about valuations is completely crazy. Companies are binary. They’re either big wins or they don’t win. Let the market decide the valuation.
Angel Investors II
0 CommentsThe second fund raises a total of $150 million. The two funds take stakes in several hundred startups, including Google.
The Godfather Of Silicon Valley
Rivlin publishes the book profiling Conway and his investments. Rivlin:
I had what I thought was this swell idea: delve deep into the life of a man named Ron Conway to tell the wider tale of the dot-com rise and fall. The story of the Internet through the second half of the 1990s writ small, as told through this guy who had slapped down more bets on Internet startups than anyone else in Silicon Valley, 240, in less than three years’ time.
Funds make money during crash
0 CommentsAngel I and Angel II are reported to make money in 2001 despite the Dotcom bust. Among the investments the funds have made are reported to be Google, Ask Jeeves, Paypal, Good Technology, Opsware, and Brightmail.
O’Neal, Schwarzenegger, Kissinger invest
Conway meets an L.A.-based agent for O’Neal via a contact at Intel, and convinces O’Neal to invest via the Angel funds. The agent shares an office with a money manager for Schwarzenegger, who also joins the funds. Conway is introduced to Kissinger via an associate of Rosen’s. His son, Danny Conway, describes how Conway maintains his contact list:
The fax machine was the most important thing in our household
Invests in Napster
Conway invests in Napster via SV Angel and the Angel Funds. Conway says that Napster creator Fanning was at a party at his house surrounded by fans, while Brin and Page were still relatively unknown:
I’m going to go talk to the two wallflowers over there, Larry and Sergey
High returns on funds
0 CommentsInvestors in Angel I earn a reported sevenfold return on investments, while Angel II earns 1.5 times, due to success by portfolio companies like Google, AskJeeves.com, PayPal, Good Technology, and Opsware.
Founds Snocap
0 0 reuben reuben2014-10-19 18:32:422014-10-19 18:32:42Founds SnocapStops investing
0 CommentsConway stops investing as the tech crash damages portfolio companies. His funds have remained in the black due to owning PayPal, Google, and AskJeeves.
Meets Zuckerberg
0 CommentsConway meets Zuckerberg at the University Cafe in Palo Alto. Recalling the encounter:
[…] social networking was very new to me. I said to Mark, ‘How are you going to measure success with this thing called social networking?’
Zuckerberg’s response:
Someday I’m going to have 300 million users using this product.
52% return
0 CommentsA letter sent from SV Angel to Angel II, LP investors states that the fund has returned 52% after the Google IPO. It says this is in the second-highest quartile of 1999-vintage VC funds. Letter:
We cannot over emphasize our desire to have returned 100% or more of the fund; yet we are thankful for the returns we have produced considering this is a 1999 vintage fund… We predict that the balance of returns will be very low (approximately $5 million) since the remaining companies in the portfolio that are doing well have had subsequent financings whereby we have suffered significant dilution in ownership and loss of liquidity preferences.