Known as the premier angel investor, Conway admitted that he had fretted about what the content for today's lecture should be, but with some urging from YC's Paul Graham, Conway opted to simply tell a few stories of how he had met a number of today's strongest tech companies: Napster, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Although going public with Altos was a huge win for Conway, he argued that he defines success by having what was, at the time, the fastest growing company in America. "And that was more satisfying than getting rich."

And the message Conway repeated to the crowd at Stanford today: "You can do it too."

Napster's Shawn Fanning: Superstardom and Borrowed Suits

Conway told of a party at his house in 1999, at the top of the Internet bubble. With 40 million users at the time, Napster founder Shawn Fanning had a large crowd around him the whole time at the party. "I'm going to go talk to the two wallflowers over there, Larry and Sergey," said Conway, who told the investor that "We're going to build a big company too, but we will never be famous like Shawn."

Conway pointed out that Fanning managed to cultivate a strong brand name with Napster, and while Napster didn't survive, Fanning used that brand name to build future companies. When Napster lost its first court ruling, said Conway, Fanning showed up in a suit he'd borrowed, as he'd never worn one before.

But as Conway noted, Fanning was smart enough to know that once Napster found itself in the courts that things were probably all over. And Fanning was perceptive enough, despite his young age, to be ready to move on to his next idea and his next company.

Building a Good Service, Building a Good Brand Name, then Monetizing: Early Google

When Google was looking for its first VC round, the founders told Conway that if he could help the company secure investment from Sequoia that they'd let him invest as well. Criticizing some of the recent protestations about valuations of startups, Conway noted that the valuation of that round was $75 million - "and every one of us felt lucky to get in on it."

Conway talked about the attention that Larry and Sergei paid to learning how to become good CEOs. And he said that the important things to the founders of Google was providing a good service, making users happy, and building a good brand name. And then monetize.

Conway also related an anecdote when Sheryl Stanberg approached Conway as Google thought it was running out of money. Ten days later, Conway joked, Google changed its mind as "AdWords started working."

What The Social Network Gets Wrong about Zuckerberg

"Zuck," says Conway, "meets the definition of 'anyone can do it if they think big.'" Railing against the depiction of the early days of Facebook as chronicled in The Social Network, Conway insists that Zuckerberg was not partying all the time. Nor was he sitting in depositions five days a week, arguing with lawyers. Rather, "he was working his tail off like any good entrepreneur."

Conway argued that Zuckerberg has had a consistent vision about what Facebook is, something that isn't evident in the film. "How are you going to measure success with this thing called 'social networking'?" Conway asked Zuckerberg in an early interaction. "Because some day I am going to have 300 million users using this product," was Zuckerberg's response. Something that demonstrates the founders humility, says Conway.

The Origin and the Definition of "Founder Friendly"

"Once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur," said Conway. You don't need to have a business plan or an MBA. All you need, says Conway, is a great idea. Anything is possible and you can accomplish it.

Demonstrating how he has been known as not just an early investor but a strong ally and advocate for startups but also alluding to some of the recent "Angelgate" controversies, Conway ended by saying "entrepreneurs build companies and should be the one who are the focus of the stories" the press writes - not investors.

"Never forget it's your company," said Conway. "It's the founder's company."

The core product at LOLapps is actually two things: a quiz creator and a gift creator. You may not have much use for these types of applications yourself, but then, you would be in the minority. When it comes to social networks like Facebook, gifts and quizzes are some of the most popular activities taking place.

With the LOLapps tools, you're walked through a step-by-step process which allows you to create your very own custom gifts and custom quizzes which you can then share with your friends.

Essentially, the LOLapps application turns everyday users into application developers - without the user ever really knowing that's what's going on. With clear instructions written in casual, conversational language, the LOLapps building tools hop users through the somewhat convoluted and complicated steps (at least that's how they would appear to an end user) necessary to register as a developer on the social network and get the application published.

For now, the company says their business model is similar to that of a website-creation tool from ages ago: Geocities. Back in the early Web 1.0 days, users could create their own web pages at Geocities and the company made money by showing ads on those pages. LOLapps is working pretty much the same way today, except now the ads appear in apps, not web sites. LOLapps is also using virtual goods to drive revenue in some company-created applications but they will not be inserting those paid goods into the apps created by users themselves, LOLapps CEO Kavin Stewart tells us.

If you want to get a feel for what kinds of applications are being built with the LOLapps tools, we asked the company for the top apps, both quizzes and gifts. Here are the results - do any of these sound familiar?

Top 10 Quizzes

1. What Is Your Future Life?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/futurelife/
2. What Greek God are you
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-greek-god-fdde/
3. What Type Of Heart Do You Have?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/whatheart/
4. What's Your Best Quality?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/bestquality-asdf/
5. Which movie star are you?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/whatmovie-asdf/
6. What type of person do you attract?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/attract-asdf/
7. What song are you?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-song-are-jcge/
8. What will your Daughter be named?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-will-your-hfie/
9. What video game character are you?
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/what-video-gam-bhdb/
10. What Kind of Music Are You?
    URL: http://apps.facebook.com/musictype/

Top 10 Gifts

1. Guardian Angels
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/guardian-angel-iibg
2. Because You're Special
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/because-your-s-badgc
3. Friendship
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/friendship-ciabh
4. Pinky Gifts
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/yildizs-gifts-djah
5. Childhood Memories of the 80s
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/childhood-memo-jhcf
6. Strawberry Gifts
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/strawberry-gif-bggdd/
7. Girly Girl Gifts
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/girly-girl-gi-geheh
8. Forever Friends Bears
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/forever-friend-fbgi
9. SUSHI
   URL: http://apps.facebook.com/sushi-ifia
10. CHOCOLATE!
    URL: http://apps.facebook.com/chocolate-bbghb

In addition to the wiki, TradeVibes is trying to grow a community around its business information listings. Users are encouraged to discuss businesses in forums, rate whether they are "bearish" or "bullish" on specific companies, or submit news tied to companies listed in the database. News is voted on Digg-style and archived on the pages of companies it is associated with. Submitting news is sort of clumsy, as you have to pick the associated company from a drop down menu -- already a rather frustrating task with just 594 listings. But this is an alpha release, after all.

Each company listing has the expected fields: overview, industry and contact info, people, funding, products, competitors, and related companies. There is also sidebar content that is updated automatically including web metrics from Alexa, Yahoo!, and Technorati. I would love to see the site automatically pull content by keyword from Techmeme or include company blog feeds in these listings.

We have 250 invites available to ReadWriteWeb readers via a this invite link. Let us know what you think of TradeVibes in the comments.