The Godfather of Silicon Valley Ron Conway and the Fall of the Dot-coms [Paperback]

Gary Rivlin tells the story of Ron Conway, the man who has placed more bets on Internet start-ups than anyone eise in Silicon Valley. Conway is a reader-friendly way into the realm of angel financing, where independently wealthy investors link up with companies just as they are being born.The Godfather of Silicon Valleytakes you into this fascinating world on the edges of the financial universe, where the pace is frantic, the story lines are rich, and every moment is perilous. Gary Rivlin is the author of three acclaimed works of nonfiction,The Plot to Get Bill Gates, Drive-By, andFire on the Prairie: Chicago's Harold Washington and the Politics of Race, winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Nonfiction. He has reported forThe Chicago Readerand theEast Bay Express. He is currently a senior writer forThe Industry Standard.

Chapter 1
KING OF THE ANGELS

The Nasdaq was far from the top of its historic ascent the first time I heard Ron Conway's name. The locale was San Francisco, inside a Mission District café whose purveyor had only recently shared with me a stock tip. The particular Internet stock he mentioned didn't seem nearly as significant as the fact that he was whispering a stock at all. The moment called to mind Joe Kennedy's famous quip that he knew it was time to get out of the market when his shoeshine boy started giving him investment advice. In today's San Francisco the equivalent is the barista in a coffee bar sharing intelligence he overhears while jerking lattes.

My companion that morning was a neighbor and Internet entrepreneur, Andrew Beebe. Beebe was representative of a type one bumped into a lot, especially in 1999: jittery smart man-child CEOs, confident and bright, young men in their twenties who all seemed to know one another and one another's business. Beebe, twenty-eight, was the CEO of Bigstep, an Internet startup created to help mom-and-pop businesses get on the Interl“'