A Letter to Entrepreneurs: Don't Pay to Pitch

broderick.wordpress.com

10 points·epi0Bauqu··6 comments

It gets even better. If someone was interested in investing in a startup then they wouldn't have to be paid to listen to pitches.

So essentially you're buying access to people who aren't looking to invest.

Someone should start a black list of funding groups that ask entrepreneurs to pay to pitch, and we should give it a bit of press here on HN. This is absolutely absurd.

I would have thought this was a no-brainer. Anyone out there know specific firms doing this?

The Keiretsu Forum are famous for this after Jason Calacanis found out about them: http://calacanis.com/2009/10/05/jason-jihad-keiretsu-forum-m...

Open Angel Forum will destroy all chapters of Keiretsu Forum in the next 12 months. We are coming to EVERY city they are in and shutting them down one by one.

We shut down Boulder and we will have Los Angeles shut down shortly.

We are replacing them with a better model for angels and entrepreneurs.... and worse for the owner of the forum (i.e. me and their founder). I heard the founder of Keiretsu forum was taking home $1m in profits personally from the Forum... all on the backs of $6k presentation fees they pulled out of startups.

We are OAF We are legion We will not stop

There are probably at least a quarter of the angel groups if not almost half here in Texas that charge. I would have thought Texas wasn't that different than the rest of the country but I could be wrong.

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