Why ‘Godfather of Silicon Valley' Investor Feels Bad About Salesforce.com
— -- Startup angel investor Ron Conway, referred to as the "Godfather of Silicon Valley," says that his biggest mistake was passing up an investment in Salesforce.com, which now may be the target of a possible acquisition.
Conway and his company, SV Angel, make early investments in startups, and their roster includes Google, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb and Dropbox. A board member of the Salesforce.com Foundation, Conway told ABC News' chief business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis in an exclusive interview that he can't confirm Bloomberg's report that Microsoft is considering buying the successful San Francisco-based cloud computing company.
He discussed Salesforce.com when asked about "the one that got away."
"Well the one that kills me is the most is because he reminds me the most, is not investing in Salesforce.com," Conway said at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York this week. "If you know [founder] Marc Benioff, you can imagine that he would remind you quite often about that."
The Salesforce.com CEO’s outspoken leadership has been in headlines in the last two months, including becoming among the first high-profile CEOs to threaten to leave Indiana over its Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Most recently, he revealed that he reviews employee salaries to make sure women are not underpaid based on their gender.
When asked which company has the brightest road ahead of it, Conway immediately names one of his portfolio companies, four-year old Pinterest, which he calls "one of the most powerful brands on the planet already."
He says "Google is not going away," but Pinterest is providing "a whole new way, a whole new paradigm instead of search."
"Pinterest is offering consumers a way to discover things on the web, in a serendipitous way, with a beautiful user interface," Conway said. "So it’s offering a whole new paradigm called 'discover' and allowing users to be creative."
