

Please boycott AlwaysOn's Venture Summit - prabodh
http://jasoncalacanis.posterous.com/startups-please-boycott-alwaysons-venture-sum

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pchristensen
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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Virax
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.

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pchristensen
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.

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

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wizard_2
I can confirm he tweeted a link to it.
<http://twitter.com/Jason/status/5026167784>

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

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

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

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ynniv
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.

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dustingetz
who cares, the economics will self-correct it

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smanek
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.

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notauser
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.

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pchristensen
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.

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catch23
AlwaysOn contacted us too (Plurchase). We told them to go away.

