There is no reason for practitioners in New York to pretend like they can’t talk to me, as if I am some random person. This is just slandering me. I am actually in a league above them as far as the world stage is concerned, if that is their excuse. I am known throughout Silicon Valley by big names that occasionally appear in Epoch Times and NTD articles. This is because I played a fundamental role in the emergence of the all-or-nothing crowdfunding industry, represented by platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. I did not, however, become famous or wealthy as a result of this. It’s just the role that I played before moving on to other things after 2009. (About the time that I moved on, I took up the practice of Falun Dafa.) The crowdfunding industry was still in an early stage in 2009 and it didn’t really become established until about 2011. In 2009, it wasn’t clear that there would be so many projects collecting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Many milestones like this were passed in the years that followed.

When Kickstarter launched in 2009, its CTO at the time, who I had chatted with briefly at a tech conference a few years earlier before they hired him, e-mailed me to find out if our website wanted to collaborate with them, but our website was on the way out because it hadn’t gotten any funding. In summary, we set the template and the direction for the later websites. I found out later that a tech enthusiast named Michael Sullivan had used our website, Fundable (2005-2009), and a term he came up with ended up naming the future industry. For a hobby tech project, which he had called Fundavlog after our website, he came up with the word “crowdfunding” in 2006. (Its goal was to fund video blogs.) A little bit of trivia: Kickstarter copied the line that I wrote for our project pages, “This project will only be funded if…” and it has been on every project page since 2009.

My business partner and I were all alone doing all-or-nothing projects and promoting it from 2005 to 2009, though we sometimes got news coverage, such as on public radio. In 2009, Kickstarter had received funding to introduce the concept to the world with narrow categories for what they allowed all-or-nothing to do, and then IndieGoGo followed them with a more open-ended policy but still for the purpose of a collection.

At the time we operated our website, some people didn’t think that the all-or-nothing setup was binding for them and it occasionally happened that they would ask us for the collection total even though they hadn’t reached their goal. It was a very obscure concept at the time, and it mattered how we presented it and what types of projects we showed as examples.

You can, with an all-or-nothing collection, go in on a group purchase to get a discount and there are other uses of it like that for project pages that Kickstarter and IndieGoGo aren’t aware of or involved in. What is actually the case is that Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are narrow but effective uses of the all-or-nothing collection concept. I have, for example, suggested adding a progress bar for the collection of material goods and another for labor commitments for real world or online projects, allowing the project pages to facilitate real world collaboration.

Kickstarter and IndieGoGo both stole from our website but at the time they launched it was difficult to get people to try out all-or-nothing collections (often they didn’t want to risk losing the total) and investors wouldn’t get on board with it either. When they came online, I was happy first that the convention was getting publicized and used, believing that opportunities would come later for me once it took off. I didn’t think they would do the opposite and go so far as to suppress any mention of our website having been around, even though we set the stage for them and made a kind of template that they copied. Later it became apparent that these websites wanted to believe they didn’t owe anything and were completely self-made. Even after they found out that the word “crowdfunding” was coined at our website, it didn’t stop them from saying this.