This Is The First Question The Godfather of Silicon Valley, Ron Conway, Asks Before Making An Investment
Y Combinator’s Sam Altman has been teaching a class called “How to Start a Startup” this fall at Stanford. The 20-session course has an amazing list of guest speakers, including early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (all lecture videos are available for free). One of the recent speakers was Ron Conway, the legendary founder of SV Angel, who’s best known for making small investments in a bunch of different early stage startups. For example, he invested in Google back in 1999, before the search engine became the behemoth it is now. How does he start his investment process? “Usually the first question I ask is, ‘What inspired you to create this product?’” Conway told the crowd. He said he expects the product to be a solution to a problem the founder personally experienced. Read more…