Tony Conrad
Tony adds deep market development and management expertise to True Ventures. Tony is simultaneously a Venture Partner at True and Founder/CEO of Sphere, acquired by AOL in April 2008. Tony currently supports KISS Metrics and serves on the Board of Directors for Automattic/WordPress, WeGame, and VoxPop.
Prior to founding Sphere, Tony was a general partner at VSP where he led consumer-tech and marketing software and services investments. Tony has served on the Board of Directors for Oddpost (acquired by Yahoo!), Iconoculture, MusicNow (acquired by Circuit City), and Centive. Tony also played an active role managing investments in Post Communications (NASDAQ: NTVS) and Stonyfield Farms (acquired by Groupe Danone).
Having worked with early-stage growth and public branded companies, Tony’s roots are in consumer marketing. Prior to VSP, Tony spent nine years abroad, working in India, France, and Indonesia. Tony was Director of Mergers and Acquisitions for Groupe Danone, a leading $30+ billion global consumer packaged goods firm, where he focused on brand extension opportunities through mergers and acquisitions in Southeast Asia. He also held several senior marketing management positions with Groupe Danone in France with his last position as head of New Product Development for Gervais-Danone France.
You can learn more about Tony on his blog.
Degrees
BS in Telecommunications, Indiana University
BA in Economics, Indiana University
True Story
Early my career, I got some great advice from Bill Draper who said “Always bet on high quality people. They chase A-quality opportunities, and they’ll seek out hard problems to solve.” As an investor and entrepreneur, that advice still holds true.
A basic tenet of any business is people. When starting Sphere, Toni Schneider and I focused on working with people that we knew and enjoyed. It started with Phil who gave me office space and led our Series A round. Martin Remy & Steve Nieker joined us as co-founders of Sphere. We knew them both from Oddpost. We raised capital from Doug Mackenzie, Kevin Compton, Will Hearst (former Kleiner Perkins GP’s), Phil Black, Jon Callaghan (Founders True Ventures), Vince Vannelli (a former Partner of mine), David Mahoney (we sit on a school board together), and Mike Winton (we invested in Iconoculture together). We added advisers, including Matt Mullenweg (Founder Automattic), Josh Macht (former Editor TIME.com), Ron McCoy (former CTO NY Times Digital), and Scott Kurnit (Founder/ Former CEO About.com). Everyone around the table was someone we knew, which means that we knew their skills, their networks, and that they could help us shape the vision. We also, and this is very important, had enjoyed working with them in the past. There was a lot of trust as we got started. You see that in our culture today.