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Comment by pchristensen | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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