Ron Conway And Chamath Palihapitiya Debate SF Housing And Google At Next Big Thing Conference

Venture capitalists Ron Conway and Chamath Palihapitiya got caught up in a shouting match toward the end of one session on inequality at the Bloomberg Next Big Thing Conference in Sausalito, Calif., today.

In an answer to what he would do if he were Mayor Ed Lee, Palihapitiya said he’d resign. That was the last straw for Conway, who’d been waving his hand for comment for the last 10 minutes of the session.

Conway is a close friend  of Ed Lee and was a major backer of the San Francisco Mayor’s election campaign, dropping $275,000 to help pass Prop E, which lowered the business tax for tech companies in SF.


Conway finally erupted and launched into Palihapitiya, calling him out on his idea for contributing employee equity to the city and also about ridiculing Marc Benioff earlier, defending Benioff’s charitable contributions to the city.

“They’re working to make it a better city and so is Mayor Ed Lee, and it is going to get better, not worse,” yelled Conway.

Palihapitiya countered, saying there were a lot of frustrated people getting pushed out of housing in the city and added in his belief in a subsidized housing tax.

Conway lost it at that point and said Mayor Ed Lee actually had a mandate in every city department for building 30,000 housing units, a third of which would be for low-income residents in the city. “Is that not enough?,” asked Conway.

It’s not and it’s a sore issue.

Palihapitiya divulged his idea to help the lower income residents of San Francisco while up on stage earlier, basically saying he thought San Francisco startups should have a 1% equity tax.

Conway, who is a long-time investor in many of the major Silicon Valley tech firms could barely contain himself over that and many other statements made by Palihapitiya, pointing out that he lives in Palo Alto and that Conway, himself, actually lives in San Francisco.

Conway then reiterated what Palihapitiya had said earlier about Google. “You ridiculed Google for not being generous enough. They’re paying $8 million dollars for the kids…Google’s participating in San Francisco. You don’t know what you are talking about.”

“He was so arrogant,” Conway said after, speaking of Palihapitiya. “Somebody had to say it. It was obvious.”