| Thanks for your note. Paddy G here again. The team are really sorry that there was a misunderstanding between us and the author of the blog article Lenny Teytelman over the cost of coming to Collision and taking part in our Collide track for startups. We really try to be as transparent as possible about the costs of attending our events. We believe that we offer great value for money for all attendees, whether they are startups, investors, speakers or general attendees. At our flagship event, Web Summit in Dublin, the numbers of those attending have doubled every year - which we feel shows that many people agree that we provide a great networking experience. Some on this thread have mentioned this. To be clear, in our call with Lenny there seems to have been a misunderstanding over costs. We followed up the conversation a week later with an extensive email setting out the costs and the benefits of attending in the hope that he and his exciting startup could come along. I've checked with the team here and from the email correspondence he told us: “I misunderstood you during the Skype call. I thought you are waving the attendance fee of $1450, instead of reducing the price to that.” Which is fair enough and we apologise if we were unclear on the call in any way. He then declined to take us up on the offer and we left it there. As I have mentioned earlier, our Startups page on the website collisionconf.com clearly states that while exhibiting for selected startups is free, there is a cost for attending. To quote: 'Each week we selected 25 early stage startups from around the world to exhibit for free as part of our Collide Program. The bigger tech companies pay $9,950 to exhibit, meaning exciting, disruptive, early-stage startups can afford to attend no matter what. All they will pay is a discounted price for tickets and Collide registration, and we’ll give them a free exhibition stand.' Really sorry if Lenny feels we wasted his time. We were genuinely excited about the possibility of him attending Collision but as mentioned previously, we do need to make the effort to screen applications so that we present the very best experience for startups and investors at our events. We are a technology startup ourselves and of course we can always improve what we do. We are working hard right now to make Collision in Las Vegas on May 5-6 a success for the hundreds of startups across 14 industry areas who are attending. The networking at our events has been called “legendary” and we try hard to live up to that tag. We are reaching out to Lenny to offer our apologies for any misunderstanding and we hope that those on this thread who are attending Collision will report back on their experience. Happy to answer any more questions. Feel free to drop me a line at Patrick.griffith@collisionconf.com. |
I am not going to engage in "he said, she said" with you. Instead, I encourage readers to look at the other comments in this thread to make up their mind about Collision. Plenty more of such concerns here http://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/2x8i04/weve_been_a....