Background and career
Ronald Crawford Conway (born March 9, 1951) is an American venture capitalist, super angel and philanthropist. He is co-founder of SV Angel, a venture capital fund.
Conway grew up in San Francisco. Conway graduated from San Jose State University with a bachelor's degree in political science. He grew up in an Irish Catholic family. Conway worked with National Semiconductor Corporation in marketing positions from 1973 to 1979, and at Altos Computer Systems as president and CEO from 1988 to 1990. He was the CEO of Personal Training Systems (PTS) from 1991 to 1995. PTS was later acquired by SmartForce/SkillSoft.
Conway began angel investing in the mid-1990s, with investments in Marimba Systems, Red Herring magazine, and others. He raised $4 million for his first venture capital fund, called Adam Ventures, in 1997. In December 1998, he started a venture capital firm called Angel Investors LP. Within two months he had raised $30 million for its first fund, Angel Investors I. At the end of 1999, Angel Investors closed on its second fund, Angel Investors II, raising $150 million. Angel Investors LP was an early investor in Google, Ask Jeeves, Loudcloud, Napster, and PayPal. The 2006 Forbes "Midas list of top dealmakers" recognized Conway for his success with Angel Investors LP. Conway was a special partner at Baseline Ventures from 2006 through 2009. In 2009 Conway turned his personal investment vehicle, SV Angel, into a venture capital firm, raising $10 million from outside investors. In September 2010, Conway criticized a private meeting of investors at the center of Angelgate, a scandal of alleged collusion. SV Angel raised six funds through 2018. In 2018, Conway announced that SV Angel would retool its investing strategy for a time, returning to a "back to basics" role as individual angels instead of raising a new fund. In March 2022, Conway announced that SV Angel had raised $269 million for its first-ever growth equity fund. The new fund is led by Ashvin Bachireddy, who previously co-founded Geodesic Capital. SV Angel also promoted Beth Turner to lead its seed fund, with Ron & Topher Conway overseeing both funds as Managing Co-directors.
Among Conway's 650 or more investments are:
Conway is active in community and philanthropic activities related to medicine and public health, serving as Vice Chairman of UCSF Medical Foundation in San Francisco and also as co-chair of the "Fight for Mike" Homer and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. He is on the development committees of UCLA, St. Francis High School, Sacred Heart Schools, UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco, Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Legacy Ventures, and Ronald McDonald House at Stanford. He serves on the Benefit Committee of the Tiger Woods Foundation. He is a founding donor of Arc Institute.
In 2021 Conway joined The Giving Pledge, a campaign established by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett to persuade and recruit extremely wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. In 2022 Conway donated $2.5 million to Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutchers' 'Stand with Ukraine' GoFundMe as well as $25,000 to Ariana Grande's Protect & Defend Trans Youth Fund.
