Venture Hype’s review of Super Angel Ron Conway Nice Guys Don’t Always Finish Last is an interesting one. It’s testament to the fact that decency, honesty, perseverance and a real belief in people can win through in the end.
For those of you who don’t know it is Conway who has angel invested in soem of the web’s best known properties, everything from Google to Paypal, both of which were his eventual saving grace after the crash of the initial dot com boom. But Conway is more than just ‘money’, his uncanny ability to produce results comes from a real belief in the people he deals and works with. He is very much a ‘people person’.
Conway consistently connects and reconnects people, not just for his own benefit but for their own, and rather than being a guy who struts around on a pompous high horse, he makes every encounter he has a meaningful one. No person is left untouched by him, and the power of recall is impressive, using his brain as a mere hive, network and conduit of information. Above and beyond this, his faith in people is unerring. By way of example, his real belief in Ev Williams, the founder of Odeo – a guy who paid back investors after the venture failed – proved fruitful when Williams followed up Odeo with new web darling, Twitter. The reality is MOST investors would have walked away time and time again.
This kind of approach really pays off, especially in the context of my previous posting, Want to be an entrepreneur?, when a commitment to a visionary is not just about a leap of faith but a real belief in that person and that their ideas. Such people, with the drive and stamina to make a successful business, will indeed keep coming back again and again, and it is only a matter of time before they succeed.
But the need to have a real belief in people stretches far beyond simply the realms of angel investing, it comes down to the very core of a functioning business. Exercising trust in individuals builds confidence, helping to foster creativity and productivity in your business. Ensuring that work gets done right and that new channels are developed and improved upon by team members who love what they are doing is critical to success.
The dynamics of a team are critical to success, and being impervious to them only leads to losses in the long term. Engendering trust, confidence, creativity and productivity through real belief is a way of harnessing work for the better, and one that costs nothing at that. You therefore ignore team dynamics and people skills at your own peril!
Web-head & art collector, living in East London and huffing on the fumes of the planet since '78. Here are my thoughts.
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