This correspondence has a breakdown of the standard charges related to being a Presenter and Featured Entrepreneur Guest. As every company differs with respect to its financial resources, stage, revenues and funding requirements, we do not have a “one size fits all” structure with respect to fees, payment terms or visibility options and will do our best get a qualified company on the conference program. As a courtesy, I can tentatively hold a Presenter or Featured Entrepreneur Guest slot for the company while you are considering this opportunity, subject to your confirmation and any further review of the company on our part.

 

Our Value Proposition - An Investor-Only Privately Underwritten Venue: In contrast with most groups that hold deal-oriented events, our principal differentiator is that we are not part of any government agency or non-profit group, nor are we supported by paid sponsors or subsidized by vendors or service providers. As a result, our events are not compromised with a high population of lawyers, accountants, advisors and other non-investors. Accordingly, our events are basically a co-op for the featured companies (basically a trade show model). We underwrite the venue with our own capital and the featured companies share in the cost. Over our twenty year plus history with some 120 consecutive fully-booked events behind us, the cost/benefit and potential value of our prestigious investor forums is well-documented.

 

About “So-Called” Free Events:  Although we wish it could be, ours is not a free event. (Over the years we have clearly demonstrated, as is true with most things in life, it is not what or if you pay, but what you get for what you pay.) Please keep in mind that any investor venue (irrespective of its quality) that offers the opportunity to present for free is ONLY free for those who are selected from, what is in most cases, hundreds of companies that have applied. And if you are NOT selected, the fact that it was free to present made absolutely no difference and you are back to the open-end costs of knocking on the doors of investors with perhaps little or no entrée. Conferences of our quality cost a lot to produce. Accordingly, someone has to pay for them - raising the questions, are presenting companies at budget-priced or free venues getting real value? Are they talking to an audience of bona fide investors, as is the case with our events, or to vendors and service providers who have funded the venue?

 

For those entrepreneurs who do not make the cut to present at "so-called" free events, then they need to pay to be there - in most cases, from about $700 to $1,500 per person or more. A recent event in San Francisco charged entrepreneurs $4,000 per person just for corporate executives to gain VIP access to certain investors. Note that all entrepreneurs at our events have equal access to every investor in attendance, no matter which visibility of Presenter option they choose. To present at our events, entrepreneurs are selected based upon their “individual merit” - not graded on a curve and do not need to win a competition based upon some subjective definition of "The Best". I wonder if Cisco Systems, Amazon, Google, e-Bay or Starbucks would have made it through a presenter selection contest. Looking at the number of VCs who turned many of them down, I would say probably not.

 

We simply want to see qualified companies based upon reasonable criteria (such as scalability and proprietary advantage) which we believe are likely to resonate with a good percentage of our investors and are run by entrepreneurs who understand the prudence and wisdom of intelligently committing some dollars to accelerate their capital raising.