Hi, I’m David G. Cohen.

UPDATE: Funding Universe posted a response to this post and has now waived pitch fees nationally as a result.

Funding Universe is expanding their presence in Colorado and they are presenting a CrowdPitch event on September 30th in Denver. It costs $125 to present your company there, and it’s free to attend otherwise.

Some of us vomit when we hear that promising entrepreneurs are being charged to pitch to investors in Colorado (or anywhere). I’m hoping people will stop doing it. In my opinion, If investors want to see companies they (or sponsors) should bear the costs instead of the entrepreneurs.

To be fair, CrowdPitch is an event that is geared towards to general community and not specifically towards investors. It’s designed as a fun investor role-playing “monopoly money” type event. But still, it’s a bummer that companies have to “pay to pitch” in any setting.

So to welcome Funding Universe to Colorado, I’ll offer to pay the presentation fees for half the companies if they’ll match me.

In any event, here’s some more information about the event:

Want to pitch?

At LivePitch early stage entrepreneurs have 4 minutes to pitch to a panel of experts and a live audience of 40 – 70 peers in order to:

1. Discover investor insight.
2. Let the community know what resources are needed to move forward (partners, services, funding, connections, talent).
3. Gain visibility in the business community.

Want to attend, but not pitch?

Attendance is free. You’ll learn how investors think, meet the hottest start-ups in Colorado, and have a lot of fun. You’ll also help decide the winner of the event by investing your monopoly money in the business of your choice.

When and where

When: Wednesday September 30th
Time: 12:00 – 1:30 pm
Where: TAXI
3457 Ringsby Ct.
Denver, CO 80216

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Andrew Hyde (TechStars Community Manager, Startup Weekend, VCWear, and main instigator of Ignite Boulder) is putting together a 1-day conference on October 2nd called BoCo. It’s got music, tech, and food. As the web site puts it, “The main goal we have is to create amazing and unique experiences. We are not hosting the conference at a hotel or conference center, instead the entire town plays host, rolling out the welcome mat and showing off what we are so proud of.” It’s an intimate, single track, all day conference with great speakers and music.

Let’s face it. You want an excuse to come to Boulder and have some fun with us and Andrew is giving you one for just $99. Come hang out for BoCo and stay for the weekend. We’ll show you around.

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I remember reading Freakonomics and learning about how in the real estate business “charming” just means small. It’s code used in real estate advertisements so that realtors know that other realtors mean “small.” There are dozens of such codes, and it pays to know them when reading the listing your realtor creates for your house when selling it.

There is a similar code for people doing reference checks. I’ve never really seen it documented anywhere, but if you’re doing reference checks it probably pays to know the basic code.

If you ask me about someone that I’ve worked with or done business with, you can expect one of three general types of responses. The first will look something like this:

So and so is just awesome. She did fantastic work and I’d hire her again in a second if i had the chance. I recommend her strongly.

This is what I would call a good/strong reference.

The second type is one of general indifference. It looks something like this.

So and so did a good job and delivered consistent work.

What I’m telling you here is that they did “fine.” I wasn’t blown away by them. I haven’t used words like “fantastic” and “awesome” and “strongly” like I did before. I’m not ever going to give a bad reference to you, and that’s the code. You should view a flat reference like this as code for “There’s nothing horrible about this person, but they’re no superstar either.” Note that I’m not telling you to run for the hills.

The third and final type of reference is one where I want to warn you off of this person and that my review is going to be mixed at best. It will generally take this form:

Give me a call when you have a second, and we’ll discuss.

This is bad news. It means I have something pretty major to tell you but I’m not willing to put it in writing. This is smart. It’s rarely a great idea to put something in writing that is very negative or highly critical of a person. Generally when I get this response from someone that I trust, I don’t even need to call them. If it’s someone I don’t know, I’ll usually call just to be sure what I’m hearing is fair and balanced, as well as verifiable.

Does this check with how you operate when responding to reference checks?

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