I Know What To Do Because I Am Very Advanced in Cultivation of Falun Dafa. That’s Why Master Li Will Never Issue A Notice About This Website.

I report to Master Li Hongzhi as part of this intervention at Dragon Springs, Epoch Times, NTD, and other places where practitioners have deviated. Everyone at all of these places who is against me is on the wrong side and this is absolutely true! A dictate sent by Master Li won’t solve the underlying problems since all of these issues have been covered in the books already. We are not an ordinary organization or religion that corrects people in such a superficial way. It is superior to let people make mistakes for an extended period of time, have a messenger warn them the whole time without giving them confirmation and tell them at the end that they were wrong and didn’t listen, and that is what this is all about. Thank you.

“So, nothing about being solo (unknown to Dragon Springs) is out of the usual for true cultivators of Falun Dafa, and Master Li mentions this, that true cultivators will often be on their own. True practitioners who self-study are mentioned at the beginning of Lecture Three in Zhuan Falun (US Translation, 2000), and it explains that they are treated as Falun Dafa practitioners just like everyone else.”

How long a person has practiced is not the determining factor in whether the person is advanced in cultivation; some practitioners have been around for 20 years and yet they don’t do anything they should do. Other people will be diligent and will only have practiced a couple years and they have far surpassed some who have been around for decades. For more than a decade and a half I have been practicing Falun Dafa and eventually– as stated in the books– people often go off on their own when they reach certain levels. So nothing about me being solo is out of the usual for true cultivators of Falun Dafa and Master Li does in fact mention this, that true cultivators will often go off on their own. True practitioners who self-study are mentioned at the top of Lecture Three in Zhuan Falun (US Translation, 2000), and it explains that they are treated as Falun Dafa practitioners just like everyone else.

So, 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 who they can’t communicate with. They don’t know me but they didn’t know any of the practitioners around them at one point and it’s not like we have some formal introduction process. In fact, I have known coordinators, both in Portland and Oklahoma City. Do they think I am not serious enough as a person compared to them? In what way? They aren’t willing to speak anymore. Do they think that I make things up casually, like the title of Special Coordinator? If they do, they should say so. They are unwilling to reply to a single e-mail. They aren’t willing to answer a single communication, much less enter into a discussion with me, and this demonstrates that they have a problem in their cultivation that is serious. I set up this title and website to address issues, out of my own initiative, being a highly qualified, advanced practitioner.

What basis do they have for not answering 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 all-or-nothing crowdfunding industry, represented today 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 I moved on to other topics 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 truly become known or established until about 2010 or 2011. I didn’t participate in it at all as it ascended because I was dealing with various tribulations in everyday life. In 2009, it wasn’t clear to anyone that there would be so many projects collecting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in an all-or-nothing model, though it wasn’t as if we didn’t see it as the goal. Many milestones like this were passed in the years that followed the launch of Kickstarter and IndieGoGo in 2009.

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 short, we set the template and the direction for the later websites by getting all of the projects that their investors and founders saw. 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, crowdfunding. For a hobby tech project in 2006, which he had called Fundavlog, he came up with the word “crowdfunding.” (His website’s goal was to fund video blogs.) In fact there was a 2007 interview with me online that was categorized under “crowdfunding,” but I didn’t know that there was a relation to a person using our website. The tagline for his website was “Fundable video projects,” using the word fundable in its original usage in business. 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 collection model from 2005 to 2009, though we sometimes got news coverage, such as on national public radio. In 2008, Kickstarter had received funding to introduce the concept to the world and started work on their website, but the difference is that they put forth a more 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 presented 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. You can’t make a web page for a group purchase on Kickstarter or IndieGoGo but people did that on our website. What is actually the case is that Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are specific but effective uses of the all-or-nothing collection model. 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 risking a collection total on the web. Where it would go from there was unknown, and you could say our Fundable website was a prototype. But after it did establish example projects that demonstrated 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, reversing the order. 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 had to start by getting people to understand and accept the all-or-nothing concept and figure out what kinds of projects anyone would do with it, which is too much work for them also to be a success the way they are today. All-or-nothing can go in many directions and those two website cherry-picked what they wanted, such as in film and tech projects. I have in recent years, for example, suggested adding a progress bar for the collection of material goods, not just money, so that projects can happen with less or even no money. Going with this can be another progress bar 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, as I said) 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 out of their way 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 and never needed us to do anything for them. There is a conviction they hold today 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.