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. Do they think I am not serious enough as a person compared to them? That I make things up, like the title of Special Coordinator? I am actually in a league above them as far as the world stage is concerned, if that is their reasoning or 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 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 in tech 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 2010 or 2011. In 2009, it wasn’t clear to anyone 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 the launch of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo.

When Kickstarter launched in 2009, its CTO at the time, who I had chatted with briefly at a tech conference in 2006, e-mailed me to see 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 in 2013 that a tech enthusiast named Michael Sullivan had used our website, Fundable (2005-2009), and came up with the term that named the industry. For a hobby tech project in 2006, which he had called Fundavlog, he came up with the word “crowdfunding.” (Its goal was to fund video blogs.) This was news to me in 2013 and in fact there was a 2007 interview with me online that was categorized under “crowdfunding.” 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 by ourselves promoting all-or-nothing projects as a model from 2005 to 2009, though we sometimes got news coverage, such as on national public radio. In 2009, Kickstarter had received funding to introduce the concept to the world, but the difference is that they put forth a defined set of categories for what they allowed all-or-nothing to do. IndieGoGo followed them with a more open-ended policy but still for the purpose of an all-or-nothing collection.

At the time we operated our website, some people didn’t think that the all-or-nothing setup was truly binding for their project 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 organized as examples.

With an all-or-nothing collection, you can 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 specific but effective uses of the all-or-nothing collection concept. Our website focused on providing an all-or-nothing service first and gave examples for how it could be used, because necessarily you had to talk about that first because there was no precedent for people doing it on the web. Where it would go from there was unknown, and you could say our Fundable website was a a prototype. But after it did establish example projects that proved the value of all-or-nothing, those two websites had the luxury to say what they wanted users to do first and along the way mention that it was enabled by all-or-nothing model second. They took it for granted that anyone would even accept an all-or-nothing project for a consumer website. Put differently, if they had started on their own, they would have also had to start with the all-or-nothing concept and figure out what kinds of projects anyone would do with it. It can go in many directions and those two website cherry-picked what they wanted. I have in recent years, 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.

Therefore, 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 these websites 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. There was no way for me to anticipate that so many people would go far out to suppress any mention of our website having been around, even though we set the stage for them. Later it became clear that these websites wanted to believe they didn’t follow any predecessor. There is a conviction they hold that they 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.