Ron Conway Quotes

When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model.

Name any issue in the world, I can tell you how technology is intertwined with it. I can tell you how technology will make it better. How it can make it worse. It needs to be part of everything that we do, whether you are a government or a company or a citizen.

Few industries have the ability to transform society like tech, yet too few companies are asking the questions or working on the problems that would create meaningful social change.

I've never known of Wal-Mart to be a good neighbor in any town it's ever moved into.

Today, 30-year-olds are becoming social entrepreneurs.

There's a lot of good that's done for society in building businesses, but it's also great to be involved in those things where you can be connected to the community, to the world, and think about how you can use what you're creating, both in terms of your personal skills as well as your products or services to do good things for others.

Our society does not give nearly enough credit to business leaders who create jobs, behave ethically and provide products and services that enhance our lives.

Business can be a source of progressive change.

Corporations, consumers, and citizens must begin acting in concert to create a powerful third pillar of social transformation if we hope to meet the social challenges we currently face with equal force. This begins with corporations that choose to alter how they practice capitalism in two ways to serve the greater good.

Renewables is part of social responsibility, but the information revolution is the only main thing I am interested in.

I strongly believe the business of a business is to improve the world.

I believe that technology has the potential to change the fate of nations, industries and companies, as well as the context of our lives. I want to help build the companies that take the risks needed to make those kinds of real changes in the world.

The question really is, are you improving the world? And you can do that in many models. You can do that in government, you can do that in a nonprofit, and you can do it in commercial enterprise.

I would like people to say that Merck continues to be a company that makes a difference in the world.

Microsoft is not about greed. It's about innovation and fairness.

Social entrepreneurs come from different backgrounds and are by and large, starved of capital. Such socialpreneurs must have extraordinary passion to follow their dreams.

Ultimately, to me, the computer is just a big pencil. What can we sketch using this pencil that makes a positive difference to society and advances the state of the art, hopefully in an outsized way?

More brands are waking up to their social responsibility and doing good work through cause marketing campaigns. Yet too many still go about it the wrong way. I mean 'wrong' in two senses. Firstly, they are marketing ineffectively, and secondly, as a consequence their positive social impact is not maximized.

Certainly I get a lot personally out of it as well, there's the recognition and things like that but mostly I try to take that as an opportunity to explain why I hope we could see more projects like Apache out there and why it's a good thing for society.

Creating a better world requires teamwork, partnerships, and collaboration, as we need an entire army of companies to work together to build a better world within the next few decades. This means corporations must embrace the benefits of cooperating with one another.

If I ran the world, I would find a way to bring the wealth of human good intentions and corporate good intentions together - to activate them collectively into shared action against shared objectives that produces shared hard, tangible results.

I'm a futurist. Technology is our way out of almost every problem we have. Technology can create a new sense of community.

The companies that are the most influential and most successful are the ones that care about impact and the influence they have on the world.

I grew up before computers. Computers are changing things, not all for the good.

People have to understand that unless social enterprise is experimental, it will not succeed in making a difference.