Investors Mad At Ron Conway

Venture Capital

from the yes,-but... dept

If you were starting a company in Silicon Valley in the boom years, you heard about Ron Conway and his “Angel Investors” group sooner or later. They were funding just about anything that had hype – which isn’t the greatest strategy in the world. Generally, when you fund based on hype, you’re buying in at higher than necessary valuations. And, if the hype collapses (as it certainly did), then you’re selling at low valuations. So, you basically have a “buy high, sell low” strategy. That’s exactly what happened to Conway – and all of the people who invested money into his various Angel Investors fund. Now, at least one of those investors, Gary Kremen of Sex.com fame, is angry at how badly Conway invested his money. He lists out a variety of things that Conway did wrong if you’re making investments in early stage companies. It is true that Conway did an awful lot of things wrong – but Kremen has no right to complain. No one forced him to invest his money with Conway. Kremen did the same thing that Conway did by investing his money with Conway, simply because of the hype, and without doing any due diligence on what sorts of companies Conway was investing in. Kremen has no one to blame but himself on this one.