> Empirically incorrect. A lot of them have raised quite a bit of money before TC50. You can't say that statement is incorrect (and be right) as the devil's ad

> Empirically incorrect. A lot of them have raised quite a bit of money before TC50. You can't say that statement is incorrect (and be right) as the devil's advocate said "may not have had the drive". The argument wasn't that TC50 companies have no investment, but that DEMO companies must have investment. In other words, with DEMO you're assured that the companies had, at some point, $20k (and probably more if they can survive with paying a $20k fee). With TechCrunch50, the company only had to impress some judges with sweat and there was no guaranteed monetary bar they had to meet (though many do have money, of course). So there's a guaranteed filter applied to every single presenter at a DEMO conference that the company had enough money to afford it-- which might be a filter that some larger scale investments/partners would prefer to be assured of to strip out most (if not all) solely bootstrapped companies that might not be companies they prefer in their portfolios.