Legendary Angel Investor Ron Conway Isn't Looking At Your Idea, He's Looking At You
With Demo Day fast approaching for the current batch of YC founders, we check in with legendary angel investor Ron Conway.
"No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than Ron Conway," Y Combinator founder Paul Graham recently wrote. "He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley, half the time because he arranged it."
Graham's essay, The Ronco Principle, argues that the power and influence wielded by Silicon Valley's great angel investor—"Ronco," as he’s known to the startup set, or "the godfather of Silicon Valley," as Fortune put it—come from Conway’s "benevolence." In a world made increasingly transparent by Facebook and Twitter, Conway has befriended (and done good turns for) many of the Valley’s most important figures who have rewarded him by tipping him off to the most promising startups. Conway's firm SV Angel made early investments in PayPal, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, among many others.
If Conway’s track record has been impressive, it has also been increasingly tied to that of Y Combinator, the startup factory Graham cofounded in 2005. Conway has been a fixture at Demo Day, when just-born startups pitch themselves to investors. Since 2007, he and SV Angel have backed more than 100 YC startups, including Dropbox, Optimizely, Zenefits, and Product Hunt. (For a time, Conway indirectly funded every YC startup, as part of Yuri Milner and SV Angel's short-lived Start Fund, an investment vehicle that YC has since taken over.)
Conway is still very much in the game, and it would not be surprising to see SV Angel invest in a few of the sleep-deprived upstarts who have been working nonstop since January in the current Y Combinator batch. (I’ve been following this as part of a Fast Company series.) With Demo Day a little more than two weeks away and YC's AngelConf taking place this weekend, I called Conway, the original superangel, to get a sense of how he plans to sift through these 114 promising companies and how Y Combinator itself has changed the startup ecosystem.
How has the world of startups changed since you started as an angel investor?To start a startup 20 years ago, you had to have a high-end, database-oriented computer. Today, it's a PC or a Mac with all open-source software. So the barrier to entry has never been lower. That also means that there are more startups, and more confusion as to whom to invest in. That's where the value of YC lies. They are the best screen in the industry for narrowing down to the best startups. YC is the Stanford or Harvard of accelerators. The advice they offer is irreplaceable. Whoever is in second place is 100 rungs down the ladder....MUCH MORE
