SV Angel’s Ron Conway: Silicon Valley’s Relationship Broker | Ep. 45
Explaining why the real edge in venture is being useful to founders—showing up, building relationships, and helping them win when it matters most.
Ron Conway is the Founder and a Managing Partner of SV Angel. He has been an active angel investor since the mid-90s and has received wide recognition for his role in the tech ecosystem. He has been included on Vanity Fair’s 100 most influential people in the Information Age, awarded Best Angel at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards, and has been named on Forbes Magazine’s Midas list of top “deal-makers” since 2011. Prior to founding SV Angel, Ron was with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions (1973-1979), Altos Computer Systems as a co-founder, President, and CEO (1979-1990), taking the company public on Nasdaq in 1982.
Ron reflects on decades of investing, from semiconductors to AI, and what it really means to be an “all in” partner to founders. He shares how relationships compound into an unfair advantage, why the best investors show up at inflection points, and how being willing to fight, whether in boardrooms or Washington, can change outcomes.
Links:
https://svangel.com/
https://x.com/RonConway
Watch on YouTube; Listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify
Clips
Fearless for founders
Ron is the nicest guy you'll ever meet, and he's also the most ferocious defender of founders when he needs to be.
"If you're fighting for a founder you have to be fearless. If I had a gravestone...just 'fearless for founders.'"
The Human Router
Ron explains that his edge isn’t capital—it’s relationships. He’s constantly connecting people, not for immediate gain, but because over time those introductions compound into real outcomes, earning him the nickname “the human router.”
The mindset is simple: meet great people, connect them generously, and trust that something valuable will come out of it.
Transcript
Disclaimer: Transcript generated with AI assistance and lightly edited for clarity and accuracy.
From Semiconductors to Angel Investing
Jack Altman
This is my first go at a live podcast, so I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we both have a sufficient number of microphones. So this will be good.
Ron Conway
I feel rude not facing the audience, but because it’s a podcast…
Jack Altman
The audience is out there.
Ron Conway
My camera is over there. If you’re back there, don’t think I’m rude. I’m doing what we do on a podcast. I’m going to leave the second we’re done because I have Nancy and Paul Pelosi sitting with Gayle and me on the floor of the Warriors game tonight. If you know Nancy Pelosi, she is always prompt and has told me to be prompt.
Jack Altman
We will not be late. We’re going to get to that type of thing as one of your superpowers. Everybody knows who you are, but as I was thinking about this conversation and this audience… We have a bunch of seed investors here in various forms of the job and various stages in their career. You are sort of the archetype of angel investing. You’ve been almost embarrassingly successful investing in Stripe, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, PayPal, Airbnb, Pinterest. It’s almost more than is reasonable to name.
What I wanted to do was try to open up how you’ve made that happen and how you look back over the decades of your investing and try to glean what an investor in 2026 can learn from you and your success. Can you give your own narrative of your career, starting from when you first got into investing and what played out over time, just to ground us in what your professional life has been all about?
Ron Conway
I think it all starts with age and seniority. And speaking of age and seniority, your mom is here and I want to recognize her.
Jack Altman
My mom’s young. There’s no age.
Ron Conway
I view myself as young too, but I want to recognize that Mama is here. We had a good time at Sam’s 40th. This is why I bring up age, because I’ve been through every technology cycle, starting with semiconductors, which is where I started my career.
I did not like school. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of school. I left San Jose State and the next Monday I started work at National Semiconductor in the Santa Clara Valley, when most of the valley was fruit orchards and an occasional semiconductor factory. I’ve been through the semiconductor phase, which gave way to the computer phase, that gave way to the software phase, then into the nineties with the internet boom. Today, the AI boom is bigger than all of those combined, I swear to God. It’s hard to fathom. It’s hard to keep up with, but I think we all have that problem because there’s so much change happening at once.
Even in the internet boom, you could keep track of things. Netscape was Mission Central. Netscape is the one that allowed you access to all of this corpus of information on the web. From that we got the internet boom. I was fortunate to go work at National Semiconductor. A few people at National went off and started a company called Altos Computer. They asked me to join. This is when the microcomputers were disrupting DEC, Data General, Prime, Wang. Does anybody remember these names? But this little Altos Computer was upending them.
Technology is all about disrupting. We were disrupting the minicomputer companies, and I love it because I interviewed sitting on the floor. There were no desks, nothing. I was the head of sales, on Walsh Road in Santa Clara, literally five blocks from National Semiconductor.
I was the sales guy, justifiably so. Technology companies are engineer-driven. Our engineering CEO, Dave Jackson, had more charisma… This Brit just oozed charisma, and he helped me close anything that was hard to sell. “You’re the sales guy. You sit next to the copy machine next to the factory.” That was fine with me because I was traveling a lot.
Anyway, we built Altos. Altos went public. We had a very successful IPO.
Jack Altman
What year was this?
Ron Conway
I want to say ‘86. Mid-eighties. Our stock went public at 21. We had our closing dinner at 21 Club in New York. I told my wife when I left, “This is not a normal business trip. We’re going public at the end of this week. We’re going to be what we call wealthy.” She said, “You are so full of shit.”
She happened to go to the bank the day we went public and I sold some stock, and the guy goes, “This is the biggest deposit we’ve ever had.” She called me up in New York and said, “What in the hell is going on? You’ve done something bad.” I said, “No, we just went public.”
Jack Altman
She’s like, “You need more IPOs.”
Ron Conway
I ran Altos, but we ran into bumpy water. Because if you don’t disrupt yourself, you will be disrupted. That’s one of my benchmark sayings: if you don’t disrupt yourself, you will be disrupted.
We were complacent. We had a great IPO, we thought we were king of the hill. Along came this little thing called the PC connected to the Ethernet, which replaced these multi-user systems. So we had to sell the company to Acer for the value of our real estate. I told this to Acer when I was selling them, “This real estate’s worth a hundred million, so it doesn’t really matter what you pay for anything else.” It’s on Trimble Road, that real estate’s now probably worth half a billion.
Then I was out of a job. Don Valentine was our lead board member. Everyone knows Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital. He came on the board very soon, was the only investor, and came on the road show with us. Don has two sons and a daughter, and like any father, he’s going to see where that daughter goes. He picked Altos out of his whole portfolio because he liked our culture.
Another thing that a founder has to do is build the culture. Some companies have bad culture. They allow philandering, et cetera. That’s not a good culture. Those people are not role models. I’m just not going to name them.
Jack Altman
We can name a couple if you want.
Ron Conway
But culture’s important. Don knew that we built a great culture. We had all these young kids. Dave Jackson’s kids worked there. It was a really cool place and our motto was: play hard, work hard. There was alcohol, but it was on Friday night, and then Monday everyone was back to work.
Don says to me, “What the hell are you going to do?” I said, “Let me tell you, I don’t like managing people.” I found that out because once you’re close to a thousand people, you just become an HR director in my opinion. Some people like managing and God bless those people. We need managers.
Don said, “If you don’t like managing people, why don’t you just come hang out with me, come to board meetings and watch me give founders advice? You’ve already been a founder, so you know what it’s like. Why don’t you become an angel investor?”
I went to board meetings with Don, and in the middle of the first board meeting I was spellbound, because he was giving this founder advice that I knew I could give. So I just started investing in startups on my own, and that led to becoming institutional, et cetera.
Jack Altman
Was there a moment in your early angel investing journey where something important happened? Was there a seminal investment that changed everything for you? Was it a slow build? How did you go from sitting in that first board meeting to getting the traction that you got?
Ron Conway
We made a bunch of investments and a lot of them failed. The very first angel investment I ever made was a company called Natural Language Incorporated, Berkeley, California.
Jack Altman
Sounds like AI.
Ron Conway
AI, yeah. My first investment ever. I’m not exaggerating. I dredged this up after the AI boom, who would care five years ago? It was run by two guys, John Manferdelli and Ginsburg. I forget his first name. That’s how my synapses are working right now. It was way too early for AI. So guess what we did. Like all good founders, let’s go find a home for ourselves.
We went up to Microsoft and Bill Gates was already all over AI, and he wanted the team. So we brought the team up. I didn’t tell him, but we were out of payroll. He goes, “I’m going to buy the company.” I said, “You gotta buy it today.” He goes, “I’m going to buy the company.” I said, “No, we’re going to do it today, because otherwise I’ll go sell to somebody else.”
He got really furious and down came the guy who now owns the Giants, who was the general counsel, because I said, “You can’t leave until we sign the deal.” It became a game. He goes, “How about if I bring down my general counsel? He doesn’t leave until the deal’s done so I can go run my company.” I said, “Yeah, that’s good.”
Manferdelli still works at Microsoft. But the investment that kind of got the clock ticking was Ask Jeeves. Ben Rosen and I… Ben Rosen was a Morgan Stanley star analyst who loved and covered Altos Computer. Altos was always a buy. We all loved each other. He went and started Sevin Rosen Partners. Compaq and Lotus were his wins. He retired from there when I was getting started. He said, “Ron, let’s go do this together. Just investing our own money. Nothing formal.”
Ben sourced Ask Jeeves, not me. The guy on the East Coast sourced Ask Jeeves in Berkeley. Him and LJ Sevin, they each had a private plane, this was years ago, I would pick them up at the airport and we’d go have not a board meeting but a build-the-company meeting. The three of us with the founders of Ask Jeeves built that company together, and it was so much fun.
The funnest part was in the car: me, much younger than the two of them, chauffeuring these two who were pretty old at the time. The shit that they would say and the stories they would tell. It was all about, “We’re going to make Ask Jeeves a huge company.”
Jack Altman
It’s interesting hearing you talk about this, because you’ve used the language of building companies a lot. I know in a lot of the companies you’ve been involved with later—Airbnb, OpenAI—that you really get in there. There’s a reputation a lot of people associate with angel investors that is extremely passive. I don’t think you think of it that way.
What does your experience of angel investing look like when it’s done well? Is it passive or should it be active? What’s the boundary?
Ron Conway
With SV Angel, you are all in or don’t bother. We’ve always taken the approach that… If SV Angel had a moniker, it would be “advocates for founders.” How we approach investing is holistic. We want to help the whole founder. We want to help them advance their career, because when they start they have no experience whatsoever. We want to help them build their team. But along the way they’re going to run into all kinds of stumbling blocks, and we are afraid of no stumbling block.
These are unusual stumbling blocks. I get the call, “My mom just got diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. How am I supposed to run this company and help my mom?” And off we go. We have formed a very close partnership with UCSF in San Francisco, one of the best medical centers west of the Mississippi. We know every department head. They make us go through procedures. Occasionally I violate those and go directly to the head of neurology, like I did last summer for a luminary in this valley.
I’m digressing here but his name’s Andy Josephson. I was in Venice. I got a call in the middle of the night from your brother—hint, hint what company it was—and I went to work. Before morning, Andy got the hint, because I said, “I want to know what doctor you’re going to assign.” He gave me a bunch of names and I said, “Give me a name.” He goes, “How about if I am the attending?” The head of all neurology at UCSF. I said, “Andy, took you a while, but you got it right. He’s in the car now coming to see you. I don’t want anyone less.” So what we do is bring some comfort to the founder and the family.
Jack Altman
You’re talking about the ability to do that, and right after this you’re leaving on time because we’re going to go see Nancy Pelosi. Part of my experience with you, when you invested in my company Lattice, was that somehow—and I knew you were involved in a lot of companies—if I called, you answered. You connected me to Marc Benioff and then he took it.
Ron Conway
Don’t ask me to do that now.
Jack Altman
One time ask.
Ron Conway
We don’t have troops and I don’t talk to Benioff.
Jack Altman
Politics comes in 20 minutes. But part of what allows you to do what you’ve done must be having the ability to be a power broker and to have these connections. There are firms now who have built a brand around that, Andreessen comes to mind, but you’ve done that on your own. You’ve been able to be in touch with the right regulators so that you can help a marketplace running into issues with the city, or things like that with the hospital, or CEOs of big companies.
What did it take to get to a place that let you have those relationships where you could help companies in a real way with a small amount of your time? Because I feel like that’s the only way this works.
Ron Conway
First, everyone at SV Angel has an attitude of: we are always on for founders. We’re advocates for founders. We’re always on. If they have a problem at two in the morning and I’m in Venice, I’m picking up the phone. But instead of the word “power,” I would swap in the word “relationship.” SV Angel has built a relationship network that no VC comes close to. Andreessen Horowitz has tried and succeeded. Marc and Ben take tiny salaries and they have the huge service org. But some of it is organic.
For me, it’s because I started my career at National Semiconductor. Guess what Steve Jobs did when he started? First it was semis and then PCs. When Jobs started the PC, the only place he had to go to find executives was the semiconductor companies. So he went and got Mike Markkula to be the chairman, and he got Mike Scott, who was the head of hybrid semiconductors at National Semiconductor, to be the president of Apple. I’m sitting in Mike Scott’s office one day and he goes, “I’m going to Apple.” I said, “What the hell is Apple?” He goes, “It’s this microcomputer thing and I’m sick of building semiconductors.”
Then Jobs came back to get Floyd Kvamme to be the first VP of Marketing of Apple. So based on National Semi, I had two relationships at Apple Computer. Then just imagine that flywheel going for 40 years. I went into software, I got to know every single software executive, a bunch of them peeled off and went to internet companies.
So when our founders need help, I have this Rolodex. Some of them are getting old, but I have this Rolodex of any company. What was fortunate is we ended up investing in some of the defining companies: Google, Twitter, Meta…
Jack Altman
Which creates more relationships.
Ron Conway
That a lot of our founders need distribution deals from. We built the management teams of those companies. Those are very easy calls, to call Chris Cox and say, “Hey, I’m sending somebody over.”
The Human Router
Jack Altman
I assume you think that being a relationship broker is very important to being a good seed investor.
Ron Conway
It’s our most valuable asset.
Jack Altman
What do you do to nurture those relationships? Obviously it couldn’t have happened without some of those early relationships, but there are a lot of other people who have early relationships like that who don’t turn into a relationship broker the way you have. I’m curious if you can talk about some of the things that you’ve done to authentically build those.
I’ve watched you at an event where you pull two people together at a party and say, “You guys should talk.” You’re not going to get anything immediate out of this, but you’re constantly brokering these relationships. So what’s going through your head as you navigate the world to cultivate this?
Ron Conway
First of all, you have to have a personality where you enjoy meeting new people. I love meeting new people. My wife hates meeting new people. I would imagine 40% of the population hates meeting new people. They’re shy, they’re not interested. There are various reasons. I happen to love meeting new people, so I love gathering people. If you don’t have that trait, it’s going to be harder for you.
I love connecting people. Marc Andreessen calls me the human router. That’s a compliment. I love connecting people, because something good is going to happen. If I made a list of all of them, it’d be a long list.
Jack Altman
So you’re obviously not keeping track though. You’re just doing this and who knows what’ll happen.
Ron Conway
I keep track of the big ones, actually. Very key intros. Somebody yesterday was telling me—I wish I could remember—but they were bragging about this thing and I said, “Who do you think did the original intro?” They kept talking and I said, “I did that intro.” Then they looked at me like I was nuts. I just described it exactly and they go, “Oh yeah, you obviously put that deal together.” I said “Yeah, we put it together, but then I moved to the next one. We have a lot of founders, and there’s a lot going on.”
Jack Altman
Is it a constant background function for you as you’re meeting people, who could I be connecting here?
Ron Conway
Oh yes. We love helping all founders. Cloudflare, that company had all kinds of problems in the early days. I helped that company because they were part of the ecosystem. If a founder stops me and has a problem I can solve, I’ll solve it.
Here’s a good one. The founder of Zoom, Eric Yuan, accosted me in a parking lot a long time ago as I’m getting in my car. He goes, “I actually alarmed you” and he said, “Guess what you did for me.” I only saw him again after Zoom. We ran into each other somewhere and he said, “We’ve got to talk about the parking lot.” I said, “What parking lot?” He goes, “You sat in a parking lot and gave me a whole bunch of advice at the beginning of my career.” I said, “Yeah, that’s fun.”
Jack Altman
It’s interesting because as a seed investor if you wake up one morning like, “what should I do today”, the common body of work is “what are the companies I should go try to meet and get time with?” I feel like there’s another orientation, which you very much have, which is just “who could I be connecting today? Who are the people I know that I could be putting in touch with each other?” I think that’s something that you have to have a long-term commitment to. You can’t just do that once.
Ron Conway
It’s a commitment to the ecosystem. The tech ecosystem in the Bay Area is really important.
Jack Altman
Do you go out of your way to build relationships in other ecosystems? For example, are you ever thinking, I should go meet people, I should go spend time with this part of the government or these people in Hollywood? Because you just know that somebody in tech will need this.
Ron Conway
Very premeditated. Media, we were way too early. We were poking around Hollywood in like 1988 because of Len Armato, Shaquille O’Neal’s agent. This is the height of the Lakers. He was a tech nut and he goes, “It’s all going to happen tomorrow.” Streaming audio, video. We invested in audio and video companies way too early.
Now we did not invest in YouTube, but I sat in the rat-infested place in San Bruno with Chad and Steve, because that’s a company I knew was exploding. That one, I actually drove, parked, put money in the meter, went in and said, “Guys, I want to be of service. Video’s going to explode.” But then we had all the copyright shit, and I feel so sorry for them. Chad, by the way, sits two seats down from us tonight. They knew they had to sell.
Thank God they sold to Google and we know what happened to Google stock. They deserve all of the benefits those two have gotten, but they knew they didn’t have enough lawyers and infrastructure. There is a right time to sell. So we tend to actually predict stuff kind of early. Look at Natural Language.
Jack Altman
If you’re thinking about going deeper with the government, because you’ve got a lot of companies bumping into regulations, you’ll go to DC for a week and just spend time with people? What does it look like?
Ron Conway
I’ve always felt like the tech industry should be civically engaged generically. We have to vote. We have to tell legislators about all the jobs we’re creating, and if we run into trouble, they should be loyal to us because of job creation. The reason I love Nancy Pelosi, you say “job creation” to her and she doesn’t care what it is. If it’s creating jobs, she’s going to help, she gets it.
But there are a lot of lawmakers—Bernie Sanders, God help us—who don’t get it, who want to demonize tech. All they’re doing is costing America jobs. That’s not fair to anybody. So yes, I’ve made it my business over the years to always know the two state senators, know the governor, know Nancy, and Schumer. Building a relationship with them is hard.
Jack Altman
But it’s true, coming to those relationships transactionally is never going to work. They have everybody coming to them transactionally all day. I guess you did it naturally, but you built those kinds of relationships over the course of your career. Of course, to be able to help the next person, you’ve got to have done something before.
Ron Conway
Exactly.
Inflection Points and Fighting for Founders
Jack Altman
Before we come back to politics, there are a couple more investing things I wanted to get your take on. There are a few times where I’ve observed you going really deep with a company. Maybe you made a small investment early and then you might have invested more. You take these really deep engagements. I know you’ve worked with my brother at OpenAI. I think you’ve gone deep with Airbnb.
How do you think about that work as it relates to the business of angel investing or seed investing? Looking back, has doing that with a small number of companies been important? Was it just fun? Is it both?
Ron Conway
SV Angel always gets involved at what we call inflection points. We tell founders that we’re not going to bother you, we’re not going to look over your shoulder. But if you’re at an inflection point where it’s life and death, that’s the shit that we’re good at. So you come to us when you’re at an inflection point.
COVID hits and Brian Chesky’s board tells him, “Jesus, do we have a company?” Poor Brian was struck by that and calls me, and I said, “You bet your ass we have a company. You’re going to have to make some hard decisions.” He already knew what they were. He was going to have to lay off half the company. These founders are smart. But that was a crisis where he was being told that the game was over, and I was like, “The game is not over. The game is just starting.”
It was so bad. I said, “Hey, this is COVID, COVID’s Armageddon. When the three of you are free—Joe, Nathan, and Brian—you call me. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning, but I’m going to give you a little lecture about who’s in charge here. You’re in charge of your own destiny.” I knew we could go raise, I forget, a couple of hundred million.
They were told that they could not raise anything. Zero. Do not bother to raise money. You can’t raise money. There’s this thing called COVID. I said, “You’re being given a bunch of shitty advice, and we’re going to go raise the money.” In ten days we had the money. We didn’t have it where I thought we were going to get it, but that didn’t matter. We got it from Silver Lake in some fancy instrument. God bless Silver Lake. Silver Lake’s quite happy right now with that.
So these inflection points, they’re kind of obvious. A founder who’s really in need…
Jack Altman
They matter so much to a founder.
Ron Conway
We’re going to put all of our stuff to the side and go help. The Silicon Valley Bank crisis, which hit the day of our founder summit three years ago, was definitely the most consequential project I’ve ever worked on. I never thought about it that way until just a couple of months ago, because I was having dinner with Wally Adeyemo, Deputy Secretary of Treasury under Janet Yellen during SVB. He said to me, “Do you understand what you did and how it came down? You got really nasty at the right time.” The government wasn’t doing anything and all they needed to do was guarantee the deposits.
Jack Altman
So what did you do?
Ron Conway
I didn’t sleep for three days. But by Sunday morning, about six hours before the Tokyo Stock Market opened, we had to have this solved or there was going to be a worldwide financial crisis. We had people in Washington, DC who just didn’t get it.
By Sunday morning… Sherrod Brown’s one of them, the head of the banking committee. We can’t spend too much time on this. But the FDIC, which is the one who had to process the guarantee of the deposits, they wouldn’t budge. I didn’t realize it but they only report to Congress. It’s very unusual because I’m like, “Who’s your boss? I’m going to go talk to them.” And Nancy Pelosi, everybody.
Their boss is Sherrod Brown and Maxine Waters. Sherrod in the Senate, Maxine in the House. So I was talking a lot to Sherrod and Maxine. By Sunday morning I got very firm with them like, “You are going to be responsible for a worldwide crisis. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, but get off your duffs and make the announcements.”
Jack Altman
It’s an interesting thing about you, because I feel like you, as you said, you love people. You’re incredibly supportive of people, you’re there for them in their times of need. But this story is an example—and there are a lot of other examples too—where you’re also not afraid to fight and you’re really willing to fight.
Can you talk about an investor’s role in those situations? I think there was a story recently where Neil at Greenoaks was in a real fight with government for a founder. I think that’s really important to do. You’ve been willing to do it, but it’s different than the “I love people, I’m going around and meeting”... It doesn’t naturally show up. I think from you, it’s coming from a place of “I love my founder, so I’ll fight for them.” Can you talk about the mindset that lets you go fight?
Ron Conway
You have to have conviction and know how to wiggle your way in to solve that problem. The OpenAI coup, when Sam was asked to leave, was a good example. I had conviction that the founder had been mistreated, and we were going to make that right. We were taking no prisoners. We knew what we had to do and we went and did it.
Jack Altman
Do you think in general Silicon Valley lacks the toughness needed in a lot of cases? I feel like other industries often will do this sort of tougher work at a higher rate. Do you feel like enough of it happens in tech?
Ron Conway
Probably not. There are a lot of companies that go out of business because they shouldn’t. The other thing—this might sound trivial—but I do not like losing. I am competitive.
Jack Altman
You have to be okay with being disliked or having people mad at you.
Ron Conway
I think if you’re fighting for a founder, you have to be fearless. If I had a gravestone, it would just say “Fearless for Founders.” That’s what we’re about, because founders do get abused. What happened to Sam is unconscionable, but this does happen. When that happens, we don’t like it and we get the blinders on until we fix it.
Thematic Investing
Jack Altman
I love it. One other investing topic I want to ask you about, and then I want to talk a little bit about politics. I want to hear about the way you think about building portfolios. SV Angel has had remarkably good returns. You’ve taken a pretty diversified approach in general. You’ve made a lot of investments, then you’ve hit some really big companies.
What’s your mindset when you think about what seed investing should look like in terms of concentration or exposing yourself to enough companies?
Ron Conway
Today it’s kind of easy because everything’s AI. But if you go back 40 years, SV Angel has always been thematic investors. I like what I do because it’s interesting, and I watch founders succeed. Watching Jack Dorsey go through shit at Twitter, he resurrected Square. It’s the best thing that you could ever witness.
We’re always thematic. We’re thematic because it’s interesting. So when I first started, I said, “What the hell do we think is going to explode? You’ve got Yahoo and AskJeeves and Lycos. There were ten search companies. Something must be going on in search.” So search became a theme. B2B became a theme. We’ve always been thematic.
We have this piece of paper. We’re always looking at probably six themes. Any company in that theme that comes in the door, we’re going to at least take a look at. If it doesn’t fit those themes, we pretty quickly turn them down.
So SV Angel is very thematic oriented. Now within AI, we have to be thematic within AI because everything’s AI. But we’ve always been thematic investors.
Civic Engagement and the California Wealth Tax
I know we don’t have that much longer, and I really want to talk to you about politics. I know it’s something that’s important to you. You talked about how you think it’s really important for people in tech and companies in tech to be engaged.
I know right now you really care about what’s happening at the state level. In particular, I’d love to start by talking about the wealth tax that is being proposed. I know you’ve been fighting it and you care a lot about it. Can you talk about why you think it’s a bad idea?
Ron Conway
One more global thing, SV Angel has always been civically engaged and encouraged founders to be civically engaged so that you know your local politicians. So when you have a crisis, you have a relationship. But we’re also philanthropically engaged. We believe founders want to give back. Guess what? You have this byproduct that morale explodes when the company also has a philanthropic bent.
But right now on this state wealth tax… I hate to be pessimistic, and I’m not normally pessimistic, but we have a crisis. We have one SEIU union that’s associated with healthcare who has a ballot proposition. They need 900,000 signatures for it, which is possible. When they get that, it will go on the ballot.
On top of all the other taxes we pay. It’s a 5% wealth tax on every asset that you have. So if this happened, they would go through your house, appraise every piece of art, appraise your car, and whatever that is, you pay 5%.
What makes it worse is if you have voting control, like Larry and Sergey do. Larry and Sergey, let’s say they own 10% of Google today, but they have 80% voting control. Zuckerberg has the same thing. A lot of founders have this. This horrible piece of legislation says your tax is based on whatever that top number is. So even though Larry and Sergey own 10% of Google, they want to tax them for 80% of the market cap of the company. That is why Larry and Sergey had to leave. It wasn’t multiple choice for them.
So this is one of the most onerous proposed ballot initiatives. Our job is to get Gavin to negotiate this so that it doesn’t get to the ballot. So maybe they don’t get the signatures.
Jack Altman
Because you think if it gets to the ballot, it’s got a good chance of going through?
Ron Conway
It could. We can’t let that happen, in my opinion. Gavin knows that and Gavin’s with us on that. So if they get the signatures… They only have money for the signatures. They don’t have money to even run a campaign. So they’re not thinking that well. At that point, there needs to be a negotiation to keep it off the ballot. That’s why there are counter ballot initiatives against this also getting signatures. We need a couple of those to get the 900,000 signatures as well, because that will give Gavin some bargaining chips.
The other labor unions are furious at the healthcare guys. Imagine what you think the teachers’ union thinks of this? And all the other unions.
Jack Altman
This is all driven by the healthcare union?
Ron Conway
It’s just one isolated healthcare union. There are even other healthcare unions. This is just one guy who is self-appointed. So the other unions, they’re watching what’s going on, their blood pressure’s going up. That will be another negotiating lever that Gavin has. We must keep this off the ballot. A whole bunch of work has to happen.
Jack Altman
Obviously you’re putting a lot of work in now. Were you doing this work earlier in your career as well, or is this something that you’ve gotten into later in life?
Ron Conway
No, we started with SOPA/PIPA when music first came to the internet. I hate to say it, Orrin Hatch and Dianne Feinstein… All the media people said, “Oh, they’re going to take all of our music away.” Also, Napster, we were the first investors in Napster. So we got involved in SOPA/PIPA when they tried to outlaw media generated by the internet on the web. This is crazy.
Topher, remember this? I was the rookie and all these other lobbyists were telling us what to do. I said, “What the hell do we do? We’ve got to stop this. This is crazy.” They said, “You should go down to City Hall and stand on a soapbox.” I said, “Oh, I’ve heard that saying all the time.” They said, “No, we’re not kidding.”
Jack Altman
Literal.
Ron Conway
We were in the middle of our weekly meeting, and they said, “Get down to City Hall. There’s a whole bunch of cameras down there. You go down, literally get on a soapbox. We’ll meet you there. You give your speech. A lot of good shit’s going to happen.” I felt like a fool. I got on the soapbox, gave my lecture, lots of cameras, and we started to turn the tide.
Shawn Fanning helped a lot with that. I remember Shawn Fanning happened to be with Orrin Hatch that day, and I said, “Shawn, whatever the hell you’re talking about, stop talking about that and tell him about this.” He was the first senator to say, “I’m voting against this.” My pal Shawn Fanning.
Jack Altman
It goes back to the thing I said earlier about your willingness to fight. I think a lot of people don’t do this, even if they believe certain things, because they’re like, “I’ve got to go have a lot of people mad at me. If I’m running a company a lot of things internally might come up. Or the media’s going to say things, and I’m tired and I’ve got a family and I’m busy.” I think a lot of people don’t do it not because they don’t care, but because it takes a lot of courage and energy.
Ron Conway
You’ve got to recognize the problem, want to solve it, have conviction, and want to win. And off you go. In my later years, because I’m the one doing it and I’ve done enough of these, I can call people up now and say, “You want to do it the hard way or the easy way?”
Jack Altman
God, I would hate to get that call from you.
Ron Conway
I did one today.
Jack Altman
That’d be tough.
Family and Legacy
Jack Altman
You mentioned Topher. You have three kids and you’ve worked with your kids over the course of your career. I think that’s a beautiful thing. I’ve got kids and it’s something I’ve thought about. I’m just curious what that’s been like for you. It seems awesome.
Ron Conway
It has been awesome. I did not ask my sons to get into the investing business. I thought it was interesting, but I don’t tell people it’s interesting. But one by one they all left jobs in LA—because they all went to UCLA—and came up and said, “Hey, this looks pretty interesting.”
Topher left his job in LA and said, “I just want to come find a place to work. So I’ll sit in your weekly meeting and pick a company and start interviewing at a bunch of companies.” Three weeks later he goes, “I don’t want to interview. This is interesting just sitting here.”
Jack Altman
It just seems like such a good way to have an adult, ongoing relationship with your kids.
Ron Conway
Of course. We all operate out of the same office. Ronny has A.Capital, Danny has Symphony. We love founders.
Jack Altman
So good. Ron, thank you so much for doing this. You’re a total legend. I love learning from you. Thanks for making time for it.
Ron Conway
It’s a pleasure.
Jack Altman
Now you’ll be on time with Nancy.