Boom! Boom! Boom!

[ Image via creative commons license from 401k. ]

Our good friend, visionary entrepreneur and angel investor Bill Lee has stepped up again and saved the day! His $100k commitment to invest this year puts the LAUNCH Festival at a whopping $1,039,000 in prize money/investments. Bill will join the Grand Jury for part of the event, and this is the second year he'll be investing in startups at LAUNCH.

$1,039,000 in prize money.

Wow.

Thanks to our supporters in order of committing to the event: TechStars ($118k), AngelPad ($120k), Venture51 ($51k), Charles River Ventures ($100k), MailChimp ($100k) and VegasTech. Angels supporting the event are Brad Gerstner ($100k), Kevin Rose ($50k), Steve Chen ($50k), Tim Young ($50k), Cyan Banister ($50k) and Bill Lee ($100k).

After four mandatory rehearsals with this startups I can tell you that they are VERY worthy of investment. In fact, I'm going to invest in three of them after the event.

In recognition of this massive win, and the event being on the verge of selling out, we're offering 100 tickets to founders for $1 each. If you're a founder of a startup visit http://launchmedia.ticketleap.com/launch/

Note: these tickets are not for angel investors, VCs, big company execs, lawyers, headhunters and the like. You folks should spend $1,000 and support the event.

Finally, there are four "sponsor" tickets left to tonight's Angel Dinner. These $1,000 tickets will get you into the most elite VC and Angel dinner ever held AND each one sponsors one of the free tables we gave away in the DEMO Pit. Do well by doing good and buy them up HERE.

If you're coming tomorrow, do get here early as there will be added security. Doors open at 7:30AM and the program starts at 9AM.

Oh yeah, the world's only Tesla Model X prototype is sitting five feet away from me while I type this. Check out the video.

And thanks to all our sponsors for making the LAUNCH Festival possible: Bing, Symantec and Wilson Sonsoni Goodrich & Rosati, as well as Tagged, Yammer, Charles River Ventures, News Corporation, Venture51, MailChimp, Silicon Valley Bank, Xtreme Labs, Sequoia Capital, Zelkova Ventures, TechStars, Box, SurveyMonkey, Trada, SecondMarket, VegasTech, Bernstein Global Wealth Management and Comcast Business Class.

best,
Jason