In 1999, Ron Conway backed Google before its IPO. 5 years later, the search giant went public at a $23 billion valuation

Ron Conway knew a promising startup when he saw one. Even so, getting into Google was not as simple as spotting the opportunity. He had to wait for the founders, keep asking for a meeting and then give them a reason to want him involved.

It started with a conversation at a party. Conway met David Cheriton, a Stanford computer science professor. Both were wearing tuxedos they did not particularly like, and Conway asked what was going on at Stanford. Cheriton told him about two students in the computer science department working on an unusual search project.

The idea was PageRank. Instead of simply matching words, the system looked at links coming into a webpage. More inbound links could signal that a page was important. In 1998, when the web was still taking shape, that was not an obvious way to build a search engine.

The Google meeting Conway had to keep chasing

Conway wanted to meet the students. Cheriton was not ready to make that happen. His answer was essentially: wait until they are ready. That could have been the end of it. Conway kept pursuing the introduction instead. Months passed before he finally got the meeting with Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The timing matters because Google was still far from the household name it would become. Conway was looking at a small project and two young founders, not the finished company people know today.

Conway later told the story at a Stanford panel in 2014. Sam Altman conducted the interview. Listening to Conway describe those early days, the interesting part is how little of the future was guaranteed. The idea was promising, but nobody could simply point to Google's later success and assume it would happen.

Page and Brin made Conway earn his place

The founders had their own terms. They told Conway they would let him invest if he could get Sequoia to meet with them. Conway had the contacts to try, but that did not make the request automatic. He still had to make the connection happen.

He did. Conway got the founders a meeting with Sequoia, which invested in Google's Series A in 1999. That is an important detail in the story because Conway was not merely using his reputation to get into a hot company. He was asked to provide something first, and he did.

Google's early investors also included some surprising names. Shaquille O'Neal, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Henry Kissinger were among them. Those names make the investment history memorable, but Conway's own route into the deal is the more revealing part. He had to keep knocking before he got through the door.

Why Conway pays attention to the person first

Conway's way of choosing startups helps explain why the Google opportunity caught his attention. He has said that he invests in people before the product idea. That matters at the seed stage. A young company can change its product once customers start using it. Conway has described investments where founders eventually threw away their first product and built something completely different.

The founder, then, has to be able to survive that change. Conway looks for leadership, focus and a strong attachment to the problem being solved. One question he asks is why the person started the company.

There is a practical reason for that question. Someone who has personally faced a problem may stay closer to it. They may also have a stronger reason to keep working when the first version of the idea does not work.

That is what makes the Google story useful beyond Google itself. Conway did not know exactly what the company would become. He saw something unusual, wanted to understand it and stayed with the opportunity when access did not come easily. The billion-dollar outcome came later. The persistence came first.