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What Makes A Good Startup Entrepeneur by Ron Conway & Paul Graham

Fun panel at today’s CrunchUp with:

  • Paul Graham, YCombinator
  • Ron Conway, SV Angels
  • Michael Arrington, TechCrunch

Here are notes of my favorite nuggets:

Ron Conway on data about his 500 startup investments:

  • “The success rate in our portfolio is going from 10% to 15% right now…because of the$25 million to $50 million M&A deals.”
  • Failure Rate was 77% leading up to the Internet Bubble of 2001…and now is about 40% post bubble (2002 to today)
  • “Repeat-entrepreneurs” have about a 66% rate of success in their second startup.
  • Deal flow did not decrease during mortgage bubble.
  • Entrepreneurs have the same level of success regardless of the climate.

Check out Ron Conway data here for more on the data from his deals)

Here are some more Ron Conway thoughts:

  • “Getting your money back( (from an entrepreneur) is not a bad deal”
  • Shawn Fanning is one of the top entrepeneurs he’s worked with.
  • Mark Zuckerberg…has grown in maturity and saaviness of being a leader…”on an algorithmic scale.”
  • Great defining companies are being created at a much quicker rate than they were 10 years ago. Awesome news for entrepreneurs.
  • An ideal entrepreneur is a little bit crazy (crazy-smart) is good

Paul Graham on ideal size of a a founding startup team:

  • 2 and 3-person startups are the best
  • 1-person startup is the next best
  • 4-person startup is the worst

Michael Arrington: Facebook is offering one-tenth of a percent of equity to top of the top engineers.

Check out Ron Conway’s Three-Megatrends of The Internet to see what markets Ron Conway is interested in.

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