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The Human Router: Ron Conway’s Playbook For Backing – And Defending – Founders

Everyone studies Sequoia's playbook. Nobody talks about Ron Conway's 'Human Router' strategy that backed Google, Airbnb, and Stripe.

Reporting by Forbes Innovation 1 min brief
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The KeyNews take

Why it matters

Conway's relationship-first investing approach and founder defense strategies offer a contrarian model to traditional VC pattern recognition, particularly relevant as AI founders face increasing market pressure.

The key facts

3 to know

  1. Backed Google, Airbnb, and Stripe

  2. Uses 'Human Router' investment strategy

  3. Focus on relationships over traditional metrics

Go to the source

Forbes Innovationforbes.com

Publisher excerpt: Inside Ron Conway’s investing playbook: how relationships, conviction, and timely action helped back startups like Google, Airbnb, and Stripe.
Read original report
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Ema raises $77M as AI starts eating into enterprise software and services

Enterprise agent adoption is moving past pilots into production deployments. A capital raise this size signals that agentic systems are becoming a category worth betting on — and that traditional enterprise software vendors face real displacement.

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OpenAI nabs key Patreon execs ahead of upcoming announcement

OpenAI is building a creator-focused product suite with deep domain expertise (Patreon's co-founder + product + engineering leads). This signals a major new revenue and engagement vector for ChatGPT — and a direct threat to Patreon's existing creator economy.

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