Michael Arrington began moderating a panel at Disrupt NY today with Ron Conway, David Lee, and Brian Pokorny of SV Angel by noting that he was “pissed off” by investor Chamath Palipitiya’s comments on Monday that startup quality is at an “all time low.”
“I don’t agree,” Lee said, explaining that he thinks the ideas in the last 12-18 months have been bigger and bolder than those before them. → Read More
Our first group on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt is Michael Arrington speaking with San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and VC Ron Conway. The group is discussing the amazing growth in tech jobs within the city limits, and Lee makes it a point to visit these companies every Tuesday.
He calls it “Tech Tuesday”. → Read More
It’s too common a story: smart, low-income kid can’t find their academic passion, so they drop out of school. But now you can rewrite this tragic tale with the help of Wishbone.org, a philanthropy website launching today where you can crowdfund high-potential youngsters so they can afford inspiring after- and summer-school programs. Wishbone only accepts seriously motivated students and produces… → Read More
During the Q&A of a press conference for the SFCiti initiative, investor Ron Conway told a pretty interesting story about a meeting he had yesterday with William Morris CEO Ari Emanuel and Marc Andreessen in Southern California.
“These bills are tantamount to censorship on the Internet,” Conway said, segueing into the anecdote where Andreessen apparently asked Emanuel whether the… → Read More
At a press conference at San Francisco’s Founders Den, newly elected Mayor Ed Lee announced sfCITI (San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology & Innovation), a set of tech initiatives spearheaded by investor Ron Conway, Mayor Ed Lee and TechCrunch’s beloved Heather Harde and contributed to by a series of tech industry partners, including TechCrunch.
Harde will be taking on the… → Read More
Enterprise relationship startup Datahug has scored $1.5 million in a seed funding round led by Ireland-based Oyster Technology Investments, with Silicon Valley super angel investor Ron Conway chipping in.
To learn more about its product, check out my earlier post: DataHug Aims To Map Digital Business Relationships. → Read More
Good morning everybody. In case you needed a reason to stare at your computer screen dumbfounded for a few minutes, here is an amazing video, financed by tech titans Ron Conway and Sean Parker, endorsing San Francisco Mayoral Candidate Ed Lee. → Read More
Today, at Disrupt NYC, CEO & Co-founder of Hunch Chris Dixon, Ron Conway of SV Angel, CEO of Betaworks John Borthwick, Managing Partner of High Line Ventures Shana Fisher , and former CEO of The Huffington Post Eric Hippeau took to the stage to discuss the current entrepreneurial landscape in New York and how it’s changed in recent years. → Read More
Yesterday, Mike broke the news on stage at Disrupt that SV Angel is doubling down with Yuri Milner once again to invest in all willing Y Combinator grads. Today, SV Angel is announcing another partnership, this time Ron Conway & crew are looking east. SV Angel and Lerer Ventures– which also announced a new fund yesterday– will announce today that the two are entering a formal partnership to… → Read More
Entrepreneurs are inherently individuals, so rolling their experiences up into trends isn’t easy. That’s made worse because 95% of the returns come from 5% of the companies. So what everyone does, doesn’t really matter. It’s what that 5% does that really matters.
David Lee and Ron Conway of SV Angel has done a deep dive into the top of the top of their portfolio and confirmed some basic wisdom… → Read More
Here’s the awful thing about having Mike Arrington as an investor in your fund. You don’t get to control over when you announce it. Arrington is on stage with Ron Conway and David Lee of SV Angels right now, and he’s being a bulldog in the best sense of the world. He asked about the firm’s new fund and Lee said “We aren’t supposed to comment on it, so no comment.” To which, Arrington said, “Well… → Read More
We filmed this week’s Ask a VC on Tuesday, and I started out by asking Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital about the danger of venture capitalists investing in competitors. There was no ulterior motive on my part. It’s just a question I’ve seen coming up increasingly as dealmaking heats up and VCs invest across a bigger variety of company stages than ever before. And, I’d recently seen that Sabet did… → Read More
Editor’s note: Reggie Bradford is the CEO of Vitrue, a social media marketing platform based in Atlanta.
Do serious tech companies still need to be based in Silicon Valley? There seems to be an endless debate about this among founders everywhere. My own startup, Vitrue, turns 5 this week. That’s forever in startup years, and it’s got me to thinking about my friend Ron Conway. Ron invested… → Read More
Remember Start Fund, the investment vehicle established by DST’s Yuri Milner (as an individual) and Ron Conway’s angel fund, SV Angel?
A couple of weeks ago, we broke the news that the fund, which is managed by SV Angel partner David Lee, made a gutsy blanket investment offer to every single one of the 40 or so Y Combinator startups in the most recent batch. → Read More
Earlier tonight, Mike posted a bombshell that must have made super angels shudder. Not content with the grenade he threw into the late-stage investing world with aggressive investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, tonight Yuri Milner announced a new partnership with Ron Conway that offers similar you’d-be-crazy-not-to-take-this-deal terms for every Y Combinator company.
But you know who might… → Read More
Unvarnished is all grown up.
The self-described reputation management site, which allows professionals to anonymously submit reviews on their peers, has just renamed its site to “Honestly.com” and raised $1.2 million from several high-profile firms including First Round Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Charles River Ventures.
Significantly, for the nature of the Honestly community, founder Peter… → Read More
An SEC Form D filed today revealed a few new things about “Godfather of Silicon Valley” and much lauded angel investor Ron Conway‘s SV Angel fund, namely that it is going after more; The forms show that what the fund is seeking has been raised from $20 million to about $30 million, and that it is also closing in on an almost $9 million update today.
This latest Form D filing is an amendment… → Read More
We received this video mail from TechCrunch reader Aditya Kapur shortly after TechCrunch Disrupt, with the subject line “Thank you for Hammer Time.” In it Kapur describes how awesome our Google Ventures/SV Angel party was and apologizes to Ron Conway for “screaming like a little girl at a Justin Bieber concert” within earshot of the powerful VC.
Highlight: “I could not believe that I was this… → Read More
As we just stated in our previous post, there was clearly an email sent by angel investor Ron Conway to a group of super angels who were likely involved in the Bin 38 “AngelGate” meeting that Mike stumbled into a couple days ago. We’ve now received a copy of the email that Conway sent from an anonymous tipster. And we’ve confirmed it is authentic from one of the recipients.
It’s a bombshell. No… → Read More
On the surface, it seemed like the situation that has come to be known as AngelGate was dying down. Since we broke the news about the secret meetings between angel investors where they supposedly agree to agree on things, a lot has been said on both sides. Mike said what he knew, and one of the angel investors present at the meeting he crashed, Dave McClure, came out in opposition to the… → Read More
If you are vaguely familiar with the Middle East startup scene, it’s impossible to escape the name Fadi Ghandour.
From his office in Jordan, Ghandour has had a heavy hand in laying the foundation of the Arab world’s rising tech scene. Among his many hats, he founded Aramex, the first Arab company to go public on the Nasdaq in 1997, was an instrumental investor in Maktoob (picked up by Yahoo… → Read More
Today, during our Social Currency CrunchUp, angel investor Ron Conway had some interesting data to share for the first time. Conway says that his company, SV Angel, has recently done an audit on the over 500 companies they’ve invested in over the past 12 years. And he was surprised with the results.
Conway expected it would show that about one-third of companies fail, one-third get investors… → Read More
Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, Michael Arrington sat down with investors Ron Conway and Paul Graham. Obviously, these are two of the biggest names in early-stage investing (with SV Angel and Y Combinator, respectively).
Both Conway and Graham had some interesting data to share. Conway, in particular, was able to give some great numbers because he’s recently done an audit… → Read More
Making buzz happen online is an elusive enterprise, but BuzzFeed is making a business around it. The New York City startup just raised an $8 million series B financing, led by RRE Ventures. Ron Conway (via SV Angel) and Chris Dixon (via Founder Collective) also invested. BuzzFeed previously raised a $3.5 million series A in 2008 from Hearst, Softbank, and Ken Lerer (who all put in more money… → Read More
Super-angel Ron Conway, who is one of the most prolific and successful investors in Silicon Valley, is expanding his SV Angel fund to include outside investors (recently he has invested only his own capital in startups). He is raising a new fund of around $10 million, we’ve confirmed.
Conway, who was called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” in a book by Gary Rivlin, is considered by many to be… → Read More
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile… → Read More
When we first covered real-time photo-blogging service DailyBooth last August, we had noticed how remarkably vibrant the community already was, and how quickly the site was amassing tons of traffic.
The startup was launched in February 2009, received some initial seed funding from Y Combinator over the summer and has now raised an additional $1 million from an all-star team of institutional and… → Read More
This morning Jason Calacanis made a quip that Ron Conway is such a prolific angel investor that all presenting companies at TC50 were getting $50,000 just for walking on the same stage with him. Conway made a face, so Paul Carr and I grabbed him back stage and asked his thoughts on frequently being called a “Spray and Pray” investor. As evidence that he doesn’t invest in everything, Conway also… → Read More
Heavy hitting angel investor Ron Conway, who’s been called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” by Gary Rivlin, is now focusing most of his investment attention on “real-time data,” according to an email he sent out to friends and contacts earlier this week. Conway was one of the earliest investors in Google, and has invested in more than 500 startups, he’s said in the past.
Conway is changing his… → Read More
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