The Godfather of Silicon Valley has been touting real-time technology startups for the past several months, and is now reorganizing his investment empire to stay focused on the trend, according to VentureBeat.
He’s peeling off David Lee and Brian Pokorny from his existing fund Baseline
Ventures, to form SV Angel LLC (a name reminiscent of his late
90s fund, Angel Investors, LLC). His son Topher Conway
and Kevin Carter will continue at Baseline. Between the two funds,
Ron expects to invest in 40 to 50 new startups over the next 18 months.
Conway is an investor in Twitter, Facebook (interestingly,
he’s not active on either of them), Aardvark, Kyte, CoTweet, TweetDeck,
StumbleUpon, Digg, Seesmic, and a slough of Web 2.0 companies that do or could
have a strong real-time dimension.
He says the real-time data market could reach a billion
dollars in 3 years, and compares its status now to internet search in 1998.
Conway’s portfolio investment approach—pick the next wave,
fund as many solid companies as you can, and watch the next Google emerge—has worked
well. That being said, he’s stayed out of the greentech boom. Big as that market is, it will
have fewer winners relative to market size, given the astronomical capital requirements.
For the two-guys-in-garage-style startup Conway seems to like, now’s a good time to be in real-time.
image credit: joi
