The Ronco Principle

January 2015

No one, VC or angel, has invested in more of the top startups than
Ron Conway. He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley,
half the time because he arranged it.

And yet he's a super nice guy. In fact, nice is not the word.
Ronco is good. I know of zero instances in which he has behaved
badly. It's hard even to imagine.

When I first came to Silicon Valley I thought "How lucky that someone
so powerful is so benevolent." But gradually I realized it wasn't
luck. It was by being benevolent that Ronco became so powerful.
All the deals he gets to invest in come to him through referrals.
Google did. Facebook did. Twitter was a referral from Evan Williams
himself. And the reason so many people refer deals to him is that
he's proven himself to be a good guy.

Good does not mean being a pushover. I would not want to face an
angry Ronco. But if Ron's angry at you, it's because you did
something wrong. Ron is so old school he's Old Testament. He will
smite you in his just wrath, but there's no malice in it.

In almost every domain there are advantages to seeming good. It
makes people trust you. But actually being good is an expensive
way to seem good. To an amoral person it might seem to be overkill.

In some fields it might be, but apparently not in the startup world.
Though plenty of investors are jerks, there is a clear trend among
them: the most successful investors are also the most upstanding.
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