Heavy hitting angel investor Ron Conway, who’s been called the “Godfather of Silicon Valley” by Gary Rivlin, is now focusing most of his investment attention on “real-time data,” according to an email he sent out to friends and contacts earlier this week. Conway was one of the earliest investors in Google, and has invested in more than 500 startups, he’s said in the past.
Conway is changing his relationship with Baseline Ventures, a fund run by Steve Anderson. Since 2006 Baseline has taken the lead in managing Conway’s deal flow. Now, Conway says, he’s reverting back to doing all of his investments directly. He’ll still work closely with Baseline, he says, particularly in syndicating angel rounds and sharing deal flow.
Conway is also accelerating his investing, he says in the email, and has a goal to invest in 40-50 companies in the next 18 months. His focus will be companies exploiting “real-time data,” which he calls “the next billion dollar market opportunity.” Conway is already an investor in Twitter and Facebook, two companies solidly in the real-time space. He’s recently invested in other very young startups like Scoopler and Twitvid. Both are Y Combinator startups. He’s also an advisor to Topsy, a new real-time search engine that launched recently.
David Lee and Brian Pokorny from Baseline now work with Conway directly. Anderson is re-staffing Baseline and will continue to invest $10 million -$12 million per year in young startups.
Smart move, how do we get Ron’s email?
I’d love to have a chat with him. Check some stuff we are working on via my twitter.
Hook us up with him Mike, it will be well worth his time.
40-50?? I also want one.. To search fb public posts and comments real time.
I have a startup for the independent film and music industry. I have designed interactive software for real-time media and product placement. I have been trying to make contact with Mr. Conway since April of this year, is there an email?
Could anyone share Ron Conway’s criteria for investing? Also, Gene would you mind clarifying your meaning on aggregate forms of data that people create consciously and publicly but not intentionally? What does that mean and what are some of the commercial consequences that you may be refering to? People Tweet, talk and write with….intent, right? You response (or anyone’s) to this query would be appreciated.
Seems like there must have been a falling out between Ron and Steve. Any details/thoughts on that?
nothing that i’ve heard.
Conway seems like a classic spray and pray.. he is not godfather.. spread your odds.. chances are some will hit
..
40-50? Wow! Could this sort of move mean “Web 3.0″ will be finally be dubbed the “Real-Time Web”?
No, real time is still web 2. Web 3 will be understanding the semantics of the communication and then obtaining a fuller meaning from an interface to a semantic app.
For example, diet in Web 3 will provide a link provided on what diet means to you. You could work in the diet field, you may be a doctor, someone selling diet food, someone intending to lose weight, and any more examples.
The link would therefore reflect what the word means to you.
No, I think semantic web is just a tiny part of what will be involved in web 3.0 on the UI side. The bulk of it will be about exploiting synergies between the back end and the front end to create hyper efficient application platforms that can then be used to build scalable, secure applications using all the buzz technologies. Semantic web will be only a piece of that puzzle on the front end, it won’t be the whole 3.0. Web 3.0 is going to be heavy on cloud utilization and scalability as a routine foundation for any web app. which thanks to web 2.0 have become increasingly real time based. Self serving yes, but some one has to do the prognosticating.
See:
http://sent2nul...earch?q=web+3.0
Ron’s going to be ahead of the curve again, solid bet. Will someone get Hendrickson in touch with Ron already…
did he ever move down here? he probably found some hot girl and fell in love, big mistake!
If anyone has an idea where the next B$ opportunity lies, he probably does.
If he’s going for 40-50 investments, was there any mention on average deal sizes he’s looking for? Are these going to be typical angel / seed rounds or early VC rounds?
Wonder how many kids going to incorporate realtime inc. tomorrow morning …
Agreed, everyone will be going RT. Real time is interesting, I’m just having a hard time seeing how it can be applied.
… real time authoritative, reliable health and medical information for corporations:
MedixNet.info
Someone on here asked how real-time could be applied – I’m thinking what can’t it be applied to! Think meaning to all of the data flooding your life. It will provide a clearer path to people in all walks of life by making reducing the number of decisions made without insight.
I’m glad someone is thinking about this!
40 deals for a 12 million dollar/ year fund is $300K avg.
Gotta love someone who has the juevos to continue to invest in early stage companies. We need more capitalist patriots like him more than ever. Bravo Ron!
i read somewhere that this guy does not even use or is able to use email message. he has some bimbo doing it for him and he just reads the print outs…what the hell does he know about tech if he is not willing or able to even log into a simple email client such as yahoo mail or gmail….what are his qualifications to invest in tech really?
there isn’t one thing in your comment that’s correct. Ron uses email. In fact, the subject of this post is an email he sent. He’s also the only investor I’ve ever met that doesn’t have an admin or executive assistant, which is crazy. He even organizes the paperwork himself. He loves startups and entrepreneurs like no one I’ve ever seen. I know of countless times that he has helped entrepreneurs even when he has no stock in the company. I want to be just like him when I grow up.
Went to a party at Conway’s house (working for a company he founded – he didn’t know me from the valet parking team). He was an incredibly gracious host, seemed a genuinely nice guy.
Weeks later I was in the office of a friend whose startup Conway was funding. The guy took a quick call, hung up confused. Turns out he had called one of Conway’s associates to thank them for a FedEx’d check for $250k. The guy he called – who led the deal for my friend’s company – said, “You’re welcome. Can you tell me what you guys do again?” Was serious. Very strange.
Hey Paul..do you have any contact info on Ron or know how I could contact him?
Thanks John
Rock on. One of the best @arrington comments ever on TC.
Michael said: “He’s also the only investor I’ve ever met that doesn’t have an admin or executive assistant, which is crazy.”
Funny, vitually all the non-VC, PE investors I meet have no admin or executive experience.
Michael must either 1) live in a rarefied envrionment without contact to the vast majority of investors or 2) choose his words imprecisely (which is really scary given he’s a journalist.
If 2), then all postings must be taken with such in mind….as the old adage goes, don’t believe what you read.
I wrote “executive experience”. I meant “executive assistant”.
Don’t ever grow up Mike…stay a toys r us kid
Good talkback Michael, sometimes grown-ups know more and can teach the kids to tone it down.
Can someone explain to me what real time is? Last I checked if I post something on my blog its ‘real-time’. If I text someone.. its real-time.. if I call someone.. its real-time.
Am I missing something here?
There have been some bullshit buzz words over the years but I think ‘real-time’ takes the cake.
it’s not bullshit. see, for example, twitter.
Okay, can we have a text book definition of “Real Time”.
Looking up wikipedia or any other informative source you will see that real time is something that reacts within microseconds and in some cases nano seconds.
Example, your in your car you hit the break pedal the breaks are applied within at 1 microsecond of your reaction. Thus “real time”.
If you put a windows machine into your back seat, re-wire everything so that your break pedal tells the windows machine to apply breaks, windows machine tells breaks to apply. This is about 15-30milliseconds depending on the sequence of time slicing windows is in, thus not real time. If you used OS X or *nix with posix yeah it would be real time.
Use two devices on two twitter accounts, drive your car using one device as “@michealarrington” and the other as @breaks, twitter “@breaks apply”, about minute later it might happen if twitter isn’t broken? Real time.. no.. sorry.
The other problem in life you can only have two of these: (fast, reliable, cheap). Cover 1 and you get the other two. If you want fast and reliable twitter is going to have to spend a huge amount of money on infastructure. Unfortunatly fast and reliable is rarely achived on huge software systems. Read about ebay architecture.
Maybe “web real time” or more preferably “data/information streams” would be a better description of this type of continuous data?
I think ‘data/information streams’ is a better way of defining this next wave of startups. Maybe even passive consumption of data. But real-time is not new and people have been battling that front since the internet was born.
Real-time has been a topic of discussion regarding the internet since 1996.. don’t believe me.. go to google.com , search ‘real time internet’ and then set the filter to 1990-1998..
I also slightly disagree with what we are calling the “Real Time Web” at the moment.
I think “data/information streams” is a valid description for what we are seeing at the moment but there is no reason why these can’t be received in almost real-time. My argument is that the technology is out there as a wider audience has probably now seen from the Google Wave demo at Google I/O. However, the technology it’s not being used by everybody at the moment to provide a truly real-time web experience. Twitter now have a real-time solution but this API is only available to choice vendors/partners.
Blog Post: What is the “real-time web”
http://blog.cap...-real-time-web/
If I was posting videos from my phone to youtube is that considered ‘real-time’? If I post to tumblr from my phone.. is that ‘real-time’ as well? What is ‘real-time’? Is ‘real-time’ mobile + internet?
The internet has been ‘real-time’ since the invention of html.. its just getting quicker and its reach is spreading as more and more powerful mobile devices reach the hands of the less tech savvy.
My comment was not an intentional trolling.. I am truely wondering.. what is ‘real-time’.. preferably a definition without ‘twitter’ in it. So far everything I’ve read/seen relating to ‘real-time’ uses twitter as an example and provides no other meat/potatoes with regards to the definition.
Real-time is essentially an open-ended idea. Generally the principal behind it is that real-time exists when a certain process has to happen within a certain amount of time or else the whole system falls apart, such as real-time operating systems or better seen in aircraft oxygen systems where a sensor has to check every .5 millisecounds or so for pressure, otherwise everyone in the cabin could die. In terms of the web real-time is really depends on the application. For one application real-time could be 5 seconds, for others it could mean 3 months. I’d hesitate to really call twitter real time because they themselves do not give themselves a time constraint. Apps that say they work in real-time usually mention what scope of time their working. There’s no way to tell when your tweet will be posted, it may seem instant but there likely is no upper bound on the time where it’s discarded if it takes too long.
Thats not strictly real-time thats more of a gurantee or SLA of when something will happen.
Take leased lines, they have an SLA that you will have availability within x ms 99.999% of the time. That does not make it a real time system.
Twitter cannot be considered mission critical.. if it is you really should consider an alternative. For that matter nor can Google or yahoo or MSN or wkipedia etc…
However the stock market is real time. If it were to stop missing deadlines and take too long all hell would break lose and trillions of dollars could be lost in the blink of an eye.
My point is that “real time” is not an appropriate term for data out of Twitter or Facebook. It has no formal deadlines and it has no major consequence if it does not act within a sufficent deadline.
It isn’t about posting something and having it available immediately, what doesn’t do that? It’s not about time limits. Like most buzz terms, it’s a misnomer.
It’s all about easy access to very recent data. What are people up to now? Traditionally you would have to go and visit all your friends pages and see what they are up to, real time is about positioning that data so you can access it all, and see the most recent first. Take that general concept, apply it ad finitum. That’s the real time web.
great answer jon, that is as general an answer to define the common use of the term as any provided here.
I agree with much of what you said. “Real-time” while simple is not really insightful enough to explain what is going on. I think it is better thought of as “Real-time” Feedback: there is data in real time; but without context or direction, data has no meaning. I’d think of real time as receiving feedback, or data in context that has meaning. From raw data to information or numbers . . .
Agree with Mike, realtime is what gives you an advantage. Wall Street Brokerages and Banks have been at it for years. Traders take advantage of applications developed generally in-house to garner realtime data to make trades = $$$$
it amazes me to continue to see all these anonymous haters spend so much time jealous of other people who are actually out there doing interesting and innovative things. These are private individuals using privately raised capital to try new things. Sometimes they get rich. Most of the time they don’t. They keep on trying anyway because they love what they do. Just deal with it.
easy mike..
I was in NO-WAY attacking entreprenuers, I myself am one.
Tell them Mike
I mean seriously. why do you spend the time reading this blog if you hate everything it stands for? Just go back to whatever it is you do all day. kicking puppies and whatnot.
easy easy guys…lmao @kick puppies and whatnot.
easy easy guys…lmao @kick puppies and whatnot.
easy easy guys…lmao @kick puppies and whatnot.
oops..sorry bout that (damn MacBook clickpad)
well said. But I am not worried (except for the kicking puppies part), true entrepreneurs will always keep trying no matter how many jealous haters are leaving irrelevant comments. I can only congratulate Conway for completely ignoring the economic trend by keeping on doing what he does best – this is where the real smart move on his side lies.
PS Thank god for your thick skin Mike
I agree with the “entrepreneurs will keep trying” the best of them are inspired by the greatest challenges instead of discouraged like many others. Thus, the haters only add fuel to their fire.
Topsy is absolutely amazing by the way.
puppycrunch.com. It will be real time puppy kicking!
Conway, gimme a couple mill!
LOL. Yeah Why MF, why?
TC is a good example of real time.
i thought real business models were the future of startups. 40-50 more twitters, now i’m scared. everything i have worked for only to be cut down by an arsenal of tweeters.
What have you worked for? Does anyone even know about your site?
And by the way, if it was worth anything, maybe you could get RC to invest. But then, you’d have to have at least one useful contact to get to him, right?
Want his cell phone number? Then you can call him and pitch your useless business to him.
That’s right, I have it. You don’t. You also don’t have a business model or anything useful to add to any conversation.
Real time relates to events and not facts. In other words it relates to people and not things people have done.
If I build a house that is real time since I am doing something.
If I built a house, that is not real time, since I am not doing anything.
Sounds like a safe bet. Nice
I had no idea that Ron Conway is one of the faces who began this beautiful, insightful, and intelligent Google. Nice to meet you Ron
Kudos to Ron
I wish him the best of luck with the next set of real time companies. I agree about the potential of them. Tools that can organize the real time data flow in good ways will do well!
What information do people need to have in real time and are willing to pay for?
the only thing i can think of is financial information which is already on lock down.
Can someone clue me in?
The upcoming ‘real-time’ startups are not about providing more real-time info rather then making sense of the wealth of already available mass of real-time info, so that the user can filter and select what she wants to consume how in real-time ore at whatever time she chooses i.e. filter twitter stuff that’s relevant to her interests or store and filter tv shows she likes and simultaneously see what people say online about the latest episode of the show she likes etc.
It’s all about mashing different forms of media together and then filter and clean it until it becomes valuable for individuals based on their profile of interests. Makes sense?
No
Steve Mobs said…
What information do people need to have in real time and are willing to pay for?
I think that there are lots, but not much perhaps in the Web-2.0 domain that targets the general public. Perhaps more in the corporate or business world.
For those who are involve in developing applications in this area for data-streaming analytics, you may find the following Bibliography references very useful:
Mining Data Streams
Teachers need feedback on students; quality feedback allows for quality teaching and then you’d see America ascend academically.
Doctors need feedback on patients.
Doctors might have fewer patients if potential patients could get real-time feedback on symptoms.
Traffic would be distributed more efficiently if there were real time feed back on where build up is . . . I could go on.
Are you saying people wouldn’t pay for these things?
You have the example:
Real Time Business with Images
http://www.cnti...com/images.html
Hmmm … maybe it’s time he focused on his hairdo instead. Seriously.
Real time is just a gimmick. You can add real time prefix to next to anything.
For all you real-time services junkies (anyone know a good one other than Twitter? Let me know), here’s a candy for you.
http://www.yout...h?v=s7oqUfe5pug
Just don’t spoil it to your friends, don’t tell them what it’s about.
Nice investment indeed, wish i would have thought and also had the money lol. Speaking of money I think the next investment is going to be gold. Kind of the new world order of things.
gold has seen a 400% increase in value since 2003. wonder if ANY of ron’s investments since then have had a similar return
Just a follow up, Hey don’t ask what the next investment will be for some people it is “Baseline Ventures” or others its something diff.
But this is forsure you have to know where the ball is going and catch it. So… in order to do that you have to know your history. Take a look at “The U.S. Sub-Prime Lending Crisis” http://suppress...om/?page_id=104
You see the problem? That lending crisis is very bad for alot of people but it could be excellent for you, just got to know where the ball is going. Invest in gold. Now i can’t say you should. If you research the ideals will come to you.
I start to love this blog….
One way to think about the opportunity with real-time is to think about the business that has been built on gmail – where contextual ad serving is paired with sort-of-live conversations.
With the right natural language processing tools, contextual ad serving, and smart use of metadata, we think it’s possible to build a business on chatter.
What do you mean by natural language processing tools?
NaturalLocator.com – find evolution
if your goal is to move everyone off of your chat server and onto IRC or jabber, real-time ad spam is surely the way to go. good luck!
I was having a conversation with the CEO of my company a few days ago on the importance of enabling real time reporting tools for our site which covers business and financial information across the middle east.
His point was that how does it help us achieve our mission which is to provide greater transparency and help people identify monitor and assess opportunities.
In response to Steve Mobs query, and Peter urban, tapping into everyone’s collective intelligence at the same time and being able to reach and respond to all those people open up new forms of collaboration and indeed transparency.
It is not just for financial info. real time reporting for events, for deals, for opinions for launches is a great way to expand reach and for any business to be agile. It also reduces operational risk
blah blah blah…how did your CEO feel about the $2mln in hardware and dedicated trunk fiber to move all this pointless data around?
I have found real time searches useful in some aspects, example following nba playoffs, but my biggest problem still is filtering through the massive amounts of information, something thats hard to do because whats relevant to one person is not so much to another. Also reading 100’s of posts every few minutes to find what I need, is not time friendly. For the most part I’m willing to wait till more a site is able to give me more relevant information that you just can’t fit in 140 characters.
Hi Michael,
Any chance of sending our information to Ron. We’re as real time as it gets. Thank you.
He should be looking at http://statussearch.net
a social graph search engine different from what I have seen yet.
I heard Ron talk at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference. Together with Chris Sacca he left a big impression on me. He has a passion for start-ups and isn’t out to prove anything for the sake of his ego – his satisfaction seems to come from sharing information and helping to stimulate the start-up industry.
We REALLY need a Ron Conway here in Australia! I for one value any trend that he identifies.
For more example of the use of real time tools, everyone was talking about Obamas speech today. Al Arabiya did a transcription of it and within minutes on twitter someone picked up that parts of it were wrong, it was then referred to another beta transcription service immediately
without tapping into that , news aggregators would have published something that would be wrong.
Someone mentioned having to go through the hundreds of comments in real time conversations would be time consuming, of course there will be a proliferation of filtering systems by topic, url, person and some form of semantic technology layered on top of that would solve this problem in the future.
i’m confident that this will grow into something very valuable
@Mike: As Ron is moving away from Baseline, does he have a new site for folks to pitch to?
I know this man, he is really the “Godfather of Silicon Valley”. I know his investments are really making internet life better
Glad to see someone is still doing seed investments. I remember last year at TechCrunch he gave out his email address. Does anyone have it? Thanks!
Before jumping onto the “real time data” bandwagon, ask yourself this:
“Are you building an everyday app?”
After you say yes, ask it again.. find ways to justify it before over engineering your software.
I’ll get off my soapbox now!
Good luck Ron!
With the advancements in hardware and communications infrastructure software developers can finally start to think about what real-time means to everyday applications rather than leaving real-time to only those applications and customers that can afford real-time infrastructure. We have taken this view to the RDBMS product space and on very low end hardware (at least in terms of the database world) have built a real-time ACID compliant database. So the time for real-time is now and if you can do it for a database you can now drive many Web based applications with real-time data. I am glad that Ron is seeing the value of real-time from an investment point of view, welcome to the club.
see http://www.groovycorp.com
..and the million dollar question is: How does one contact Ron directly?
I have a 240character paragraph that would interest him.
Yea does this guy have any web presence to contact him?
oh please, we need a reality check here. look at the massive infrastructure, proprietary code, massive investment needed just to get you (near) real-time stock quotes…and that market has been in development for decades, and has a extremely constrained data source.
people keep barking about the twitter example but the signal/noise ratio there makes it useless for anything but boredom-elimination
i smell a great opportunity to fleece VCs
Sad News you guys , Actor David Carradine, star of the 1970s TV series “Kung Fu” who also had a wide-ranging career in the movies, has been found dead in the Thai capital, Bangkok.
It said a preliminary police investigation found that he had hanged himself with a cord used with the room’s curtains.
I think its a conspiracy!
Ron, if you are looking for real time pizza search, http://www.worstpizza.com is happy to be acquired
Ron Conway explained how he invests at a conference I attended at Stanford. He started at National Semiconductor, ISTR. He’ll put $100k into a good idea to see if the team can hit a milestone.
I have a sense that not all teams can do that. He talked about ‘taking an internal round’ as opposed to raising a second round to fund the burn rate should that milestone not be hit.
I could see how a meeting like that might go. I think he’s a boddhisatva, and we all know how much of a pain in the ass a good boddhi can be.
Can someone please post how to contact Ron?
I’ve heard from several reputable sources that one of Ron’s first big investments from the real-time pool will be in http://www.futurefeed.net
Too bad he missed TIBCO.
Or did he?
Want real time data?
Imagine a mesh surveillance camera system operated by citizens, watched by citizens and fighting crime that covers every major metro area in America.
Sign on with Facebook connect, enter the chat, see a fight break out and hit “report” police are dispatched and the day is saved.
Later, browse police reports via OurBlock.TV and click one button to watch that crime happen in video form that matches the police report and with one click share that with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook or your blog.
Imagine becoming a broadcaster for only $49 (price of a camera) and making $500 a month in ad revenue while reducing crime, saving lives and helping your community.
That’s the dream of OurBlock.TV and the website is BUILT we just need an investor. Owner@adamsBlock.com if you’re interested.
Tom’s too late. Real-time is so 2008. It’s all about future data now — stuff people have thought about posting but haven’t posted yet.
Michael -
Ron and you should take a moment to look under our hood. We have been working on our platform for 3 yrs and are launching with a retailer partner + ecommerce platform vendor next month. IMHO we represent the future of real-time interactive merchandising and ecommerce. Thanks for the consideration.
David
More example of real time services – providing deals/coupons based on the geographical location you are in.
Providing realtime traffic/weather information based on the location are in.
In IT world – providing realtime information on the performance of your network so proactive action can be taken to mitigate any risk.
There are so many things which are begging for realtime services. I better find Ron’s address and email.
Subraya Mallya
Glad to see the commenter’s as bullish about real-time data as I am. A couple points to clarify: I’m proud of the investing I’ve done with Steve over the past three years and my partnership with Baseline is as solid as ever. I consider Baseline a preferred investor, will continue in my role as a limited partner and look forward to continuing to work together in helping entrepreneurs build companies.
thanks for commenting Ron
Ron, I want send you my elevator pitch. Very interesting project.
Can you send me your email ?
http://artishev.com/konsalting
http://www.link...artischevandrew
Sorry, this link right
http://artishev.com/kontakt
Put your email here
Two years ago people were all saying Web 3.0 was the semantic web, as if they knew what the future would hold.
I always leaned more toward real time services and Flash-like platforms as being the new web. Because it was intuitive… the “old web” was like DOS … static and clunky, while desktop apps were interactive and real-time. So it was just a matter of time
Except realtime social things were better!
Michael: How do I reach this guy? I have a business plan to show him! gregory &at gregory.net
Speaking of… Mr. Conway’s on the TechFellow panel… wonder which way that particular breeze is blowing right now? Michael, anything to post by way of a Founders Fund TechFellow update? Keep hoping Dave M will post an update… no joy though.
Ron bro, give me some love.
Twitter and Facebook just scrape the tip of the iceberg. They focus on INTENTIONAL data. This raises the issue of Unintentional Social Realtime data… There’s many aggregated forms of social data that people create consciously and publicly–but not intentionally. What are the legal/ethical bounds to this? These are public activities (so there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy) and they have commercial consequences… Anyone looking into this space?
Has Ron Conway EVER posted a comment on TC before?
he sometimes troll anonymously, but not under his real name.
(kidding)