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 entertainment industry “wanted to turn the United States into China?” with the Stop Online Privacy Act.
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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 (voluntary) role of Vice Chairman of sfCITI and newly hired SF Chief Innovation officer Jay Nath will serve as a liaison between tech companies, the committee and the SF city government. Alongside its mission of tech community support, sfCITI will be working with Code for America to build a civic-minded startup accelerator, funded by Google and the Kaufman foundation. → 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.
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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 invest in one another’s deals.
There are limits to how cozy they are getting. The funds are still distinct, with no direct financial stake in one another. And there’s no requirement or quid pro quo. Indeed, SV Angel’s fund is much larger, so there will likely be more West Coast deals being closed between the two. Like the Y Combinator deal, this is just an offer on the table for all new SV Angel and Lerer Venture portfolio companies. “It will always be at the discretion of the entrepreneur,” said SV Angel’s Ron Conway backstage at Disrupt. → 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 and busts some of the bigger myths.
The biggest thing we all knew was that cofounders tend to do better than single founders; more controversial will be the finding that younger founders do better. That’s a hotly debated idea at TechCrunch, and the key is looking at companies that either have had or are expected to have outsized results. When it comes to the macro-startup economy, that’s what keeps all of us in business.
Although there was some debate over whether 25 is really the optimum age, as some Valley investors have said in the past. After all Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams were older than that, as was Groupon’s Andrew Mason. The slides don’t always provide easy answers. For instance: Repeat entrepreneurs do disproportionately better according to the data; but so do young entrepreneurs. When do they have time to get all those previous ventures under their belts? Do paper routes and lemonade stands count?
The most shocking slides are embedded below. → 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 I’m an investor in the fund.” Guess it exists.
The new fund will co-invest with Yuri Milner in backing every single Y Combinator company that will take their money. In the last class 43 of 44 took the deal. The one who didn’t was Likealittle, which had already raised money from several VCs including SV Angels. Thirteen of those have raised additional rounds. → 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 write a blog post on the topic.
Little did I know then the big drama that had been brewing between Spark and two competitive companies behind for months. Not investing in competitors of existing portfolio companies is great. Even better? Not offering one a term sheet after months of due diligence before you decide that they’re competitive.
TechCrunch has learned from three sources that Spark Capital reneged on a termsheet offered to a New York-based startup called Bnter, throwing the company into tumult and reportedly enraging its well-known angel investors who we’ve heard include Chris Dixon and Ron Conway. → 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 in Vitrue on October 28, 2006. He’s a true industry legend (noteworthy enough to have his own Wikipedia page) and a long-time Valley resident. At the time, we had several late-night, semi-sober conversations about moving the headquarters to Silicon Valley. Five years later I’m glad I stuck to my guns and kept the company in The Big Peach. We have quite a vibrant startup community here with companies such as MailChimp, MFG.com, and Scoutmob, and Solo Health.
So with all due respect to my good friend and uber-Angel investor Ron Conway, here are five reasons why I’m glad I didn’t move us from Atlanta to the Valley. And why Silicon Valley, despite still being the capital of the technology world, doesn’t necessarily make or break a company. → 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 be even more bummed by the news than the super angels? Sequoia Capital. The top Valley firm led Y Combinator’s last funding, less than one year ago. At $8.5 million, this was a big step up for Y Combinator, dramatically allowing it to expand how many startups it could let into its incubator. And it should have been a big advantage for Sequoia too: A way to see a crop of new deals early in an increasingly competitive investing landscape, where most VCs are being shut out of early rounds by super angels. It seems Milner stole the opportunity right out from under Sequoia. → 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 Kazanjy is officially opening the site to any professional. → 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 from the first time SV Angel filed this Spring and it refers to a $22,805,000 in total new funding vs. in $13,865,000 in April. A little handy subtraction reveals that SV Angel just wrastled up another $8,940,000 to be specific. → 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 close to MC Hammer.”
Thank you for reading Aditya. → 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, it’s a nuclear bomb. It speaks for itself. Read it below. → 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 allegations. But things have gotten more interesting this evening.
McClure sent out a tweet earlier that was clearly meant to be a direct message. It read, “Ron is throwing us under a bus. and it’s chickenshit that he writes that after David Lee comes to both meetings.” He quickly deleted the tweet, but not before plenty of people saw it, responded to it, retweeted it, and it was syndicated elsewhere. → 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 last year for $164 million) and remains an active angel investor.
On this week’s episode of Entrepreneur To Entrepreneur with Shervin Pishevar, the founder of SGN talks to the man he calls the “Ron Conway of the Middle East” about the region’s investment climate, how Aramex became an incubator for Maktoob, what he’s buying now and why he says “until today, I never even knew i was an entrepreneur.” Videos ahead. → 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 their money back, and one-third bring a 2x to Google-x return (Conway invested in Google early on). But that’s not the case. Conway noticed that during the Internet Bubble in 1997 to 2001 — the failure rate (startups that go out of business and the investors get nothing) was a staggering 77 percent. “It was catastrophic,” he said. → Read More
