ron conway

San Francisco's governing digerati and politicians like to think of the City by the Bay as the innovation capital of the world and the capital of Silicon Valley (see "San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee banks on tech startups").

The video above, titled "This is How Technology Will Create a Smarter San Francisco," promotes the San Francisco Citizens Initiative for Technology and Innovation (sf.citi), a nonprofit that has the support of more than 330 local companies.

Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, Biz Stone of Twitter and Obvious, Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman, and … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--"San Francisco is the innovation capital of the world," Mayor Ed Lee proclaimed to more that 3,000 techies gathered here at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. He was preaching to the choir as he previewed a map showing more than 800 startups located in San Francisco. The map is part of InnovateSF, a month-long series of events in October to promote tech innovation in the city.

Legendary angel investor Ron Conway echoed Lee's cheerleading for San Francisco as a capital of Silicon Valley. "When Pinterest moved to San Francisco (from Palo Alto, Calif.) a … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The pace of startups popping up seems matched only by the emergence of new "incubators," or "accelerators," whichever word you chose to describe these startup boot camps that have cropped up across the country.

And Paul Graham, the man behind the grandaddy of them all, Y Combinator, barely pays attention to them. What he is convinced of, though, is that many will die, and that they're formed for the wrong reason.

"People are doing it because it's the cool thing to do," Graham told me during a break … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--If you 're an entrepreneur looking for money today on the famous Silicon Valley venture capital row known as Sand Hill Road, yes, that is the sound of crickets you hear.

That's because today is Y Combinator Demo Day, and the lion's share of the biggest tech-oriented VCs in the Valley are packed into one auditorium here, listening to 65 early-stage companies pitch their wares.

The list is a veritable who's who of investors: Ron Conway, Tim Draper, Jeff Clavier, Mike Arrington, Stewart Alsop, and many, many others. And they've got their checkbooks … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Talk to just about any entrepreneur in Silicon Valley these days, and there's a better than average chance one name will come up: Ron Conway.

The founder of SV Angel, an investment firm that has its fingers in dozens of the biggest names in technology today, Conway is known by many to be among the savviest investors around. His portfolio is a who's who of the best and brightest in tech--Twitter, Airbnb, Dropbox, Groupon, and dozens of others. He's not only successful, he's also prolific.

In a recent profile in Fortune, Conway explained that he … Read more

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway sent a sobering e-mail on Tuesday to the 130 start-up companies he's invested in: now is the time to hunker down.

"In 2000 and 2001, the companies that hunkered the fastest were the companies that survived," said Conway in an interview with CNET News. "Get costs under control; make sure you have plenty of runway."

While that admonition from Conway, a noted investor who over the years has put early money into tech giants like Google and up-and-comers like Digg, was timely, it's hard to imagine that any tech executive who's been paying attention to the news needs to be reminded that rough economic conditions are most definitely ahead.

How bad those conditions will be and how long they'll last is anyone's guess. The CNET Technology Index, which tracks 66 publicly traded tech companies, dropped for the third straight day Wednesday to hit its lowest level in more than three years. Even the healthiest of companies are seeing their stocks being sold en masse. Google, for example, finished trading Wednesday down 2.28 percent to $338.11 per share; that's a new 52-week low and less than half the asking price for a Google share in November 2007

Bad news persists in the overall economy as well, despite continued attempts at government intervention. The Dow, Nasdaq, and S&P 500 indexes all continued to slide Wednesday; the Dow has now dropped 35 percent from its high a year ago.

CNET contacted more than 20 tech executives, venture capitalists, and industry gurus Wednesday to ask "How long and how bad this will be for the tech industry, and what should companies do about it?" Not so surprisingly, there was no consensus. While nearly everyone interviewed is concerned about the economy, their reaction to it and their plans to deal with it are across the map. Experienced investors like Conway and venture capitalist Larry Augustin of Azure Capital Partners are cautious, while some executives (at least in their public comments) are downplaying the risks to their businesses.

Ron Conway, an investor in more than 100 contemporary tech start-ups and about that many in the last tech boom, sees the current financial environment as very similar to the 2000-2001 tech economy meltdown. His advice, as he laid it out to me earlier today and to his portfolio companies yesterday in an e-mail (after the jump), is the same as it was then: "Raise money internally by reducing cost."

He says, "The funding climate is going to tighten no matter what we do. The sooner we can prepare for it, the better."

At least, he says, entrepreneurs are more mature and proactive than they were in the last downturn. They're coming to him, some with cutback plans and some just seeking advice. As he puts it, the ones who come to him and say, "Walk me through the steps I should be taking," are the ones that will weather the storm.

Conway still feels it's a great time to start a company: if you're a "great entrepreneur with a great business idea," he says, "now is as good a time as any." But "hold on to your day job while you are raising money." … Read more

TradeVibes, a site that aggregates information, news, and opinions about start-ups, raised $900,000 in seed funding from a group of angel investors that includes serial technology investor Ron Conway, early Google employee Aydin Senkut, and the Kinsey Hills Group.

Mill River Labs, the company behind TradeVibes, is certainly well-connected, given that its four founders were early employees of PayPal. Conway, who was an early investor in Google and PayPal, will act as an adviser to the company, along with YouTube co-founder Steve Chen and Ariba co-founder Ed Kinsey.

Mountain View, Calif.-based TradeVibes launched its free site in beta … Read more