Sympathy for the scorned
I have just come back to my desk feeling mentally
drained, having witnessed a grueling display of public humiliation. The Global
Internet Summit is in town, and with it the standing feature ‘Meet the Money’.
Never heard of it? Well, seven hopeful e-entrepreneurs line up to present their
business plans to a panel of four Venture Capitalists, hosted by a moderator.
Seems cozy enough, right? Actually, it is a slaughter - think of it as a
mixture of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’, ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and the
French revolution.
The nervous entrepreneur has to stand up in front of
the gaze of two hundred new media professionals, and give a two-minute account
of themselves and their business in order to convince the VCs to – on the basis
of those two minutes of ramble – invest in the idea. The fab four then
scrutinizes every aspect of the idea, usually shaking their heads in
disapproval. The battered is finally finished off by the almighty moderator,
who consistently slashes every case by the knuckles. After that, another
visionary is brought out for public slaughter.
As you can probably tell, I couldn’t help but
feeling sorry for the poor hopefuls: All I know is that my fragile ego would
never be able to take the kind of beating that they had to experience. Maybe
the battering was unusually relentless at this event, bearing the recent
dot.com death and the frosty VC market in mind. Let’s hope so; for the sake of
mankind.
The interesting thing though, is the fact that the
seven Swedes, although not accustomed to insolence and the in-your-face format
of the gathering, seemed to cope well with the ridicule. According to the
moderator, the Swedish edition of ‘Meet the Money’ was the first one during
which none of the entrepreneurs backed out when seeing what was in store for
him/her.
Still, I feel they deserve some sympathy, so the
URLs are listed below. I’m sure any contributions are welcome, however small
they may be.
http://www.globalinternetsummit.com
http://www.Integral.se
http://www.Frontville.se
http://Vitrado.de
http://www.Picofun.com
http://www.NetLight.com
http://www.Goyada.com
http://www.Intermezzon.com
