Show me the money…..

This is going to be a very rude post that is likely going to ruffle some feathers. This is a censored version. The uncensored version is even more inflammatory.

I hate pitch demos. I hate contest game shows even more.

You know it’s really embarrassing when a big company puts up a pitch competition, and the size of the prize is ridiculously small. You spend a ton of money putting up the conference, buying plane tickets, and in the end, you issue a ridiculously small amount of money like USD 10k or USD 100k for a prize. Also, it’s absolutely ridiculous to go through this amount of time and effort and end up giving one prize to one winner. In Hong Kong alone, we are going to need hundreds of startups in order to generate the amount of employment that we need to make this a success. If you look at all of the startups in all of Asia, we are going to need tens maybe hundreds of thousands of successful startups.

Alibaba is putting up USD 150 million, just in Hong Kong. These are the numbers you should be talking about. The other thing is that we then get into business model. Jack Ma has a ton of money. Jack Ma wants to make more money. So how is he going to do it. Well, it puts his USD 150 million into small businesses, those small businesses are going to end up using his platform. He wants to have as many successful startups as possible, because every time you have a successful startup, his cash register rings.

Now let me ask a rude question about the contests. What’s their business model and how does that business model work with the model of the startup? (In case, people are wondering about my business model. I provide support services. The more successful startups, the more people will pay for me to do stuff like regulatory consulting or programming or something else. I also make loans to small companies. The cool thing is that when I trace the money, it turns out that in the end, a good chunk of my money ends up with Jack Ma and Li Ka-Shing, which is cool.)

OK. Let me come up with a constructive suggestion. Crowdfund. You put in USD 10k seed capital into the fund, and then you pull out the tin cup and collect donations from the audience to pay for the prizes. Better yet, do what Alibaba is doing. Start a fintech fund, and instead of having a demo, just the platform to announce all of the investments that are being made.