Ron Conway Explained

http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/07/ron-conway-explained/

by sharpn • 16 years ago

118 37 16 years ago

bhorowitz.com

paulbaumgart• 16 years ago

This link works for me: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/04/07/ron-conway-explained/

Could sharpn/a moderator replace it, please?

sharpn• 16 years ago

Thanks for the updated link (no idea why it was moved). I tried to edit, but couldn't - I guess it times out.

faramarz• 16 years ago

Does anyone here have experience working with Ron? anything else to add?

I really enjoyed reading through this article.

pg• 16 years ago

We have a lot. This article is right on.

joshu3• 16 years ago

I'm a relatively active (but junior) angel investor.

When I need advice, Ron is where I go.

jmintz• 16 years ago

Best article about Ron I have seen. He is awesome. (He is one of our investors.)

tumblen• 16 years ago

If anyone has read The Tipping Point, Ron Conway is an amazing example of a 'connector'.

In this example, he made a single connection that Tipped Tellme towards success.

Would be interesting to put together a list of angel investors that similarly stand out as connectors.

joshu3• 16 years ago

Ron isn't so much a connector as he is THE connector.

SWalker263• 16 years ago

I love this quote from the post: "If Ron’s awake, he’s working. He can be at a party, in his pajamas, or at the Super Bowl. Ron is always on the job and the network is always on." That's the world I come from. You have to work your balls off to succeed (as I discuss in tip #6 here: http://bit.ly/5Gccio). Fuck this part-time shit that Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson (at 37signals) are pitching. Ask Larry Bird or Michael Jordan if they worked part-time on their basketball skills?

marketer• 16 years ago

You know, there's probably a whole class of professional athletes that have a hard time supporting themselves. I don't have the numbers, but I'd expect that most minor-league players don't make remarkable salaries, but they continue for a chance to make it to the major leagues.

SWalker263• 16 years ago

Maybe they're not working hard enough. Larry Bird and Michael Jordan both said they were the first to the gym and the last to leave. My point here is simple: there are no shortcuts to success (other than rare exceptions).

dzlobin• 16 years ago

Crudely worded and some unnecessary finger pointing here, but your point is correct, to some extent.

As they say, it's 99% perspiration.

As far as DHH and JF pitching a part-time work ethic, I think you missed the point. DHH frequently talks about his building of Basecamp, and he said that you don't NEED to be working 90 hours a week to make a successful product. Since DHH only had 10 hours a week that he could use to work on Basecamp, he advocated for making every single minute count.

joshu3• 16 years ago

Actually, I think both are right.

For a connections business like Ron's, he's got to be in more places at once, and as available as possible. This gives him a direct advantage.

For a creative business like DHH's, you simply can't work 90 hours a week sustained.

jasonlbaptiste• 16 years ago

I sincerely hope I have the honor of working with Ron one day. The values described here are hard to come by and the same ones that I was taught to value growing up. The values of honor, loyalty, and timeliness transcend "money".

rjurney• 16 years ago

I read the book about Ron they mention, Godfather of Silicon Valley. It is not a good book, but it is interesting in that it captures the fervor of the dot com era.

The really funny thing is that the timing worked out so that the dot com bubble exploded just before the book was finished. Rivlin therefore spends the entire book building Conway up as the world's biggest jerk. The book is a character assassination. Conway lets Rivlin into his life, and Rivlin is unmerciful. Conway is depicted as the personification of the excesses of that era. The book comes out after the market crashes and it had to hurt.

Then... Google hits. Conway was an early investor. He's back. His methods are validated, his fund returns profit, he starts new funds. They prosper. And now Conway is the king of the world again, and Rivlin is the douche.

Oh the ironing.

jackowayed2• 16 years ago

Am I the only one that loathes those link previews?

Qz4• 16 years ago

Huh? Not getting any link previews here.

jackowayed2• 16 years ago

On the article, if your mouse passes over a link (and you have JS enabled), it pops up a snapshot of what that page is, using http://www.snap.com/.

It appears to require you to have your mouse over the link for a little while (like a tenth of a second), so if you always move your mouse fast and never considered clicking a link, you wouldn't have seen it.

It's really annoying.

nzmsv• 16 years ago

Yeah, I've been adding all these preview sites to adblock. So much better.

initself• 16 years ago

That is the most readable site layout I have ever seen.

cookiecaper2• 16 years ago

I still used Readability on it. I appreciate that it's not gaudy or hard, but I couldn't resize the text to the size where I like it (which is a large size); after two Ctrl+Wheel-Up increments, the tab stops responding and has to be killed in Chromium on Linux. Just used Readability because it doesn't have the same problems.

Qz4• 16 years ago

Is chromium good? I just did ctrl+wheel up 10 times on that site in Firefox and had no problems.

netcan• 16 years ago

I'm not sure exactly why, but something about this kind of sits badly. Somehow, I don't like the idea that a person has this infrastructure role.

stretchwithme• 16 years ago

it seems human networks are inevitably composed of humans

djhomeless• 16 years ago

I've always had a high opinion about Ron despite never meeting the man. After reading this, it makes you want him as an investor that much more...

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

LOVED the last ditch email haha...."we may be going down":

"So sometime after 11pm, I wrote Ron and essentially said: “hello, you don’t know me, I’m an executive at a company you’re an investor in, and we need a meeting—in person—with the CEO himself of this Fortune 50 company—this week—and if you can’t make this happen, hey that’s ok, but we may be going down—sorry.” Ron wrote back in literally 2 minutes and said, in what I have learned is Ron’s distinctive email style (immediate, short, all caps), “AM ON IT.”"

barmstrong2• 16 years ago

Just to elaborate...I'm thinking back to some of the most memorable moments of my life, and they have come out of situations like this, where for some reason you need to accomplish the impossible in a very short amount of time. That's when you really do something drastic and operate on the edge of your ability, and amazing stuff happens.

zackattack• 16 years ago

The Game song, referenced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJZhKT7W6g

P.S. HipHopGoblin is now open source, a few of us from HN are working on bringing it back to life. We are implementing it now with DirectedEdge. Email me if interested.

Ron Conway Explained

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