Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

One of my favorite highlights of TED are the conversations with the incredible people who attend.  David Hornik, who before becoming VC extrodinaire and gracing the pages of Business 2.0 (check your current issue) was my lawyer and mentor when I first went to the Valley, organizes a great dinner party every year with his partners at August Capital.

Here are some fun highlights from last night’s dinner and various tidbits of conversations I’ve been having with various friends both old and new.

• My old friend author and journalist Steven Levy (who wrote about my last company in his book Crypto) entertained us with the story how he found Einstein’s brain as a young reporter. Hilarious.

• Loic and I had a great laugh about blogstorms. Loic is becoming the accidental king of blogstorms and he has the best sense of humor about the some of the blowback that comes from living publicly in the blog world.  Loic just makes me laugh.

• Jeff Clavier (who invested $15 million in Zero-Knowledge when he was at Reuters Venture Capital) and I laughed about all sorts of fun stuff. We spoke about his great strings of investments including Dogster and how to build communities online. Jeff also graces the pages of Buisness 2.0 (along with Reid, David and other Web 2.0 angels) and he’s giving me some tips on angel investing

• Reid Hoffman is one of the most generous entrepreneurs, angel investors and one of the most brilliant product strategistists there are in the social media space. We laughed about who is the “Sexiest Angel Investor” in the valley. I won’t tell you what I think, but if you know Reid ask him about my theory on who the sexiest angel investor is. Reid also has the best stories of interesting business proposals he gets. Sometimes they extend beyond business proposals

• John Doerr and I got caught up yesterday. He gave the most compelling TED presentation on the need to address climate collapse and hosted an incredible breakfast meeting to help instigate and promote postive action for the environment. He is helping Ron Dembo and I with a new project involving the environment that I’m involved with. John is an incredible sales person and a man of action. When he talks about change, it is with conviction and the power of action which gives him credibility that few people enjoy.

This is just an update. When I have time I’ll post the video interviews I did with my childhood hero James Randi, or last years TED talk superstar hit Sir Ken Robinson.

On Fri 9 Mar 2007.