Ron Conway at Startup School 2013

Good morning! Good morning! Mic, mic works. Okay, well, thanks for coming, Ron. We're delighted to have you here, and we're going to jump right into things.

Um, I wanted to talk about Twitter first because Jack Dorsey is coming here later, and they're going public. They're doing so well. I want you to take me back to when you first invested and what you saw in them and how you first invested.

Uh, sure. Uh, I got to know Evan Williams because, uh, back in 1998, uh, we invested in Google. So, we knew Google from the early days, and Google acquired Blogger from Evan. That's the company that Evan founded. So, I got to know Evan through that, and then over time, Evan left Google and went, uh, to start an incubator called Obvious Corp.

And Odeo was one of the companies that that was incubated at Obvious Corp. Odeo was in the podcasting space, which was very interesting to people at the time. And, uh, I invested in Odeo. Odeo ended up not doing well; the podcasting space did not blossom.

And, um, Evan, to his credit, felt so bad about Odeo going out of business. It was Evan's second startup. Uh, he gave all the investors their money back, um, which was pretty amazing. And I said, "Evan, you don't need to do this; you know investors are big people who know that you can lose money. Uh, 40% of all of our startups go out of business completely; we don't get a nickel out of them."

I said, "Evan, you're just in that bucket; don't worry about it." And he said, "No, I feel so bad; I want to pay the investors back." And I said, "Fine, but whatever you do next, I'm investing 75K in that," uh, and the next startup was Twitter.

And so, you lucked out there. What was it about Evan, though, that made you say, "You know, I'm in the next one; just count me in"?

Well, it was that he had such amazing human feelings about feeling bad about going out of business. Um, and I had tried to help sell Odeo. We tried to get Odeo to a soft landing, and I can't even remember; maybe we did.

Um, but he felt bad about it, and I said, "Wow, what a great person." You know, at SV Angel, we invest in the people first, and when you have somebody do something as impressive as that, um, you want to invest in the next one.

And when they said Twitter, I said, "Hey, I don't care what it does; here's the money." So when he said, "Okay, Ron, here's what we're doing; here's what you're investing in," what did you think?

Well, he was nice enough to say, "You should go talk to Jack Dorsey," 'cause Jack, many of these others, uh, had started taking off right away. And the big problem Twitter had was keeping up with the growth.

Uh, the fail whale became more prominent than the bird. Let’s, um, speaking of Snapchat and Pinterest, um, and I'll throw in Facebook: you invested in all of these very early before they were big.

I'd love for you to just remember back to what the founders were like or what you thought about the product way back when they started. I guess Snapchat's newer, but the other two are older. So, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

So, uh, well, I feel like we've talked about Twitter. Um, uh, Facebook. Uh, so, Facebook I started with Shawn Parker, uh, 'cause we invested in Napster. Then, we were the first investors in Plaxo; that was Shawn Parker's second company.

And so when Shawn became the president of Facebook, he came to me and said, "Hey, you know, come and mentor me and Mark." Um, and I said, "Great." Um, and so the first time I met Mark and Shawn, funny enough, it was just a few weeks after they had moved to California.

And the pro Facebook metrics were already like this, going straight up, just like Twitter a few years later. And you never argue with the metrics.

So, the amazing thing about Zuck is, is the vision and confidence that he had—not arrogance, but confidence—that this thing is going to keep growing. And at the end of the first meeting, I said, "Hey, how many users is this thing going to have in a couple of years?"

And he looked me in the eye and said, "300 million." Uh, and it ends up he was off by 700 million because Facebook has over a billion users today.

Um, but he was thinking big then. Um, I feel like you, with Facebook, I know you've told me that you're a little bit skepti...