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Ron Conway

Ron Conway

Managing Partner, Angel Investors
(Conway is one of the most successful "angel" investors in early-stage tech companies, including Google, PayPal, Digg, and many others.)

"I feel sorry for the [winner of the Presidential election]. He's got a really, really hard job. It's the economy, the economy, the economy for whoever comes into office. Paulson, or whoever ends up in Treasury, is going to have to give them a real baptism by fire. Whoever gets elected is going to have to become an economic expert immediately, because the U.S. and the world is going to depend on them.

[He needs to do] whatever he can do to restore [consumer] confidence. A lot of that is state of mind. If the new President just gave them some confidence, you would see a big change in (consumer) attitude, which would be a big, big help.

Well, we've never been fond of Sarbanes-Oxley. The less government involvement in Silicon Valley, frankly, the better off we are. People want more regulation for the big banks, and where things really went wrong. But in the early-stage startup environment, the more laissez-faire we can be, the better.

In this economic crisis, the government has bigger fish to fry than the early-stage community. The regulation and the government hearings will all be focused on how we got into the mortgage crisis and how we prevent that from ever happening again."