By YOUNG MONEY Staff
31 July 2010

Ron Conway seized venture capital fame - and fortune - by selling e-commerce linchpin PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion and investing in the early stages of Google.

Friday, he shared some of his insights and his knowledge at TechCrunch's Social Currency CrunchUp, a conference at Stanford University. By looking at more than 500 companies that his firm SV Angel has invested in over the past 15 years, Conway has gathered some interesting data.

For one thing, he found that during the infamous dot-com bubble of 1997 to 2001, fully 77 percent of startups failed, a result Conway called "catastrophic."

That's the companies he and SV Angel actually invested in; now, the failure rate is 40 percent, a huge improvement. Perhaps young entrepreneurs really have learned from the mistakes of the past.

Another comment of Conway's grabbed headlines yesterday, when he spoke at AngelConf 2010 in Mountain View, California. The investor said that he wants every old and young entrepreneur with the "guts" to go out and start an innovative new company to get funded.

Times have changed since the heady days of the internet bubble; Facebook is likely delaying any potential IPO until 2012. But guys like Ron Conway are still out there, investing in creative ideas like Mint.com and foursquare, and helping drive innovation on the web and beyond.