Twenty-nine, and in over his head in the worst spring in a generation
Recalled but not checked against any source. Treat everything here as a first draft awaiting correction.
Junior partner at Oak Hill Venture Partners, made partner in 1999, who became chief executive of Consilient in 2001 when the firm exercised its right to replace Jonathan Hare.
Hare's assessment, recorded in his own words: Ray was twenty-nine, and one of the smartest and nicest people I've ever met. But he got in over his head, the market collapsed, and he got desperate and did desperate things. Everyone in technology and venture was desperate in the spring of 2001.
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He told the company he would pitch every firm in the valley and knew them all. Three months later he returned with none, and proposed laying off almost everyone.
That is not, on Hare's own account, a story about incompetence. The spring of 2001 was the worst fundraising market in a generation and almost nothing was closing anywhere.
Hare's account is that Conley, having made partner in 1999, had borrowed against a set of bubble-era deals done at very high valuations; that Consilient was the only one still growing; and that under Oak Hill Venture Partners' model — capital advanced to partners on full-recourse notes from Robert Bass rather than as carried interest — he carried genuine personal downside. Hare says Conley told him this in the spring of 2001, when asked why he was taking the legal risk.
Hare records that Conley had no apparent reason to misrepresent it, since it was offered as an explanation of his own aggression rather than as a defense of it. Hare has never seen the Oak Hill partnership agreements.
Recorded as Hare's recollection of a private conversation. Ray Conley has not been asked for his account; it would be recorded here alongside this one, on the same terms.
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