With his “ample girth,” snow-white hair, and crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, 60-year-old Ron Conway stands out among the “hoodie-wearing 20-something entrepreneurs” of Silicon Valley, said Miguel Helft in Fortune. But that’s not why everyone there knows his name. Conway is one of the Bay Area’s most prolific angel investors, having taken stakes in more than 600 Internet companies since the mid-1990s. Plenty have gone bust, but others, like PayPal, Google, and Twitter, are now household names. And he’s no passive investor. “Nurturing start-ups and their founders is his religion.” Valley newcomers he mentors are often floored by his 18-page “partner list” of 1,300 top business executives he can call on their behalf. “There isn’t anyone he doesn’t know,” says Ben Rosen, the former chairman of Compaq. “He was the Facebook of the industry before there was a Facebook.”
For a man who lives to nurture new Internet firms, Conway isn’t much of a techie. “During the dot-com boom, he would print every email he received” and scribble notes on them so an aide could respond. He’s since mastered email, but hardly uses Facebook or Twitter. “I never said I enjoy anything about using the Internet,” he says. “I enjoy helping the entrepreneurs who are building this thing.”
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