Please boycott AlwaysOn's Venture Summit | Hacker News Reader

Please boycott AlwaysOn's Venture Summit

jasoncalacanis.posterous.com

31 pointsprabodh23 comments

The answer isn't to stop charging (although that's a good start), the answer if for any of these forums to:

  -list their prices
  -list the % of pitching companies that go on to receive funding

This way you can justify a high price tag, should you choose to charge one

Thank you for saying this more clearly than I could have. The HN fervor has demonized this practice, which is surprising to me as I had expected a more free market opinion from aspiring entrepreneurs. If price < chance * amount, paying to pitch is actually a sound investment. I assume that the numbers don't work out in this way, but we should aspire to have a reasoned opinion.

Exactly. If my screening process was so good and my investors were so active that I had a 70% investment rate, I'd happily put my price tag at the top of a page that had a list of all the funded companies and investors that put in $$. What Jason has dug up though is that the investors at these forums don't pay dues because the entrepreneurs aren't very good, just desperate. And since the investors don't pay, the forum has to accept any startup willing to pay the fees.

This is very naive. The investor / con artist can report any attractive numbers they feel like - who is going to keep them honest?

I strongly suspect that investors who change to be pitched are in fact scam artists who do just enough investment to plausibly deny that they are in fact scam artists while taking in huge amounts of cash from ignorant start-ups and forcing the start-ups that do agree to receive investment into contracts that strongly favor the investors.

I'm sorry, but charging to pitch fails the common sense test; it is little more than a way of separating fools from their money.

In practice I fully agree. I was just playing devil's advocate describing a situation where it would be justifiable to pay to pitch. The conditions you'd have to meet would be referenceable clients, both entrepreneurs that got funding + active, known investors with a public track record.

TechCrunch50 is probably the closest to this - they get a rich pool of applicants because of the publicity + prize + success of previous winners and presenters. But they don't charge.

Can anyone confirm that this is actually Jason Calacanis' blog? Normally he posts stuff somewhere else.

It is his blog. He puts quick stuff here, longer stuff at calacanis.com. This one has stuff about his vacations, his HOA, etc in addition to quick tech stuff.

I can confirm he tweeted a link to it. http://twitter.com/Jason/status/5026167784

Anyone who pays to pitch is so far off the map, does it even matter what they do?

Its pathetic .. Do we have any system in place to know how credible is any VC/angel/Conferences

Do you really need one? Just don't ever pay money to pitch.

Can I upvote you twice? I don't understand why this is such a hot topic. If a VC asks for money to pitch, kindly thank them for their time and walk away.

I suspect that people want to protect each other by raising an alarm here... honestly, if you need someone to tell you not to pay to pitch, you have bigger problems.

Isn't that what www.thefunded.com is supposed to do?

TheFunded has pretty stupid membership requirements though. If I recall correctly, they require you to submit your business plan as part of the sign-up procedure. I think that's worth boycotting them along with the pay-to-pitch groups.

Where have you heard such non-sense?

The requirement is to provide some kind of proof, in the form of a linkedin profile or the bio page of a startup, that you are indeed the founder of a startup.

Hmm, that's what I remembered when I tried to join about 18 months ago. I've tried again now and it didn't ask for all that detail, so it might have changed, or my memory could be flawed.

It may have changed, but all I needed was a website and a bio.

who cares, the economics will self-correct it

We only have a free (and self-correcting) market if there is perfect information.

Jason is helping the free market by giving it access to better information.

> We only have a free (and self-correcting) market if there is perfect information

Thats pretty idealistic. I say we have never had perfect information, and yet the world doesn't end.

You are actually describing (part of) a perfect market - a free market is just one without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud.

(Thanks to Wikipedia for the description.)

I would like to see more perfect markets or near-perfect markets but curiously enough they tend only to be stable with government intervention. A good example is the UK retail DSL market which was essentially created by regulation and has a very high degree of competition (and low prices!) within the constraints of the wholesale environment that contains it.

That's where I think governments do their best work - setting up clear rules that cause the interests of companies and the public to be aligned, then letting "the market" perform within that rule framework.

AlwaysOn contacted us too (Plurchase). We told them to go away.

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