Tony Conrad is a great name, the kind a screenwriter might give to a hero or a villain. It’s not hard to picture Tony Conrad coming to the rescue. Then again it’s easy to see Tony Conrad stealing the sympathetic protagonist’s wife. Tony Conrad sounds John-Grisham-confident. Mellifluous with just the right amount of tough, like well-tanned leather. Rakish? Maybe. Solid? Sure. And then there’s cool–as in you named The Velvet Underground cool, which is one of the encomiums attached to the avant-garde artist and composer named Tony Conrad.
But we just stumbled on that cool Tony Conrad while looking for more about this Tony Conrad who is “Animal Whisperer, Triathlete, Holder of Serious Parking Karma & Pour-Over Drip Coffee Skills,” not to mention the founder of About.me and startup cynosure True Ventures. (A visit to the portfolio page of True Ventures is probably as good a glimpse into the future as the present allows–from the 3D printer MakerBot Industries to Starbucks disrupter Blue Bottle Coffee.) This Tony Conrad’s got that laidback style that Silicon Valley futurists are always striving to present, but the former Indiana farmboy has earned it: before he started helping invent the future he lived in Jakarta and New Delhi. Some of his companies have picked up the tricks he seems to have learned there, too, including levitation. And if you set up a profile at about.me, he’ll be the first one to visit. We’re hoping the other, avant-garde Tony signs up tomorrow.
