Free Ticket to the LAUNCH Festival

tl;dr: Set goal of LAUNCH Festival being biggest event in tech industry w/5,000+ peeps. Giving scholarships (free tickets) to developers, designers, founders, UX folks. Apply here.

Lawyers, VCs, angels, corporate raiders and rich folks can buy tickets.

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Friends,

The LAUNCH Festival is March 4-6th, 2013, and this is the sixth year I've run the event (the first three as TechCrunch50 and last two as the LAUNCH Festival). I don't need to make a profit on the event, and frankly I'm bored with how easy my life is getting and want to challenge myself. #realtalk

We are already the best place to launch your new startup (1.0 competition) or product (2.0 competition), but we want to go bigger and do more  for the startups who choose our stage over DEMO and TechCrunch Disrupt. The three things startups need are cash, developers and PR. We're the best place to get all three. Hands down. We crush Disrupt and DEMO on these three factors -- but we want to push our event harder!

You see, AOL is making about $2M in profits from Disrupt, and DEMO throws off well over a $1M in profits for IDG by charging the startups up to $20k each to present. We don't have to make any money, so we can do crazy, insane and disruptive things: like give away free tickets to cool people!!! :-)

I've set three insane stretch goals for myself and my awesome team (Kirin, Krute, Brice and Demant among others):

1. FUNDING: Raising $10M from the audience via a crowdfunding app for the 50 startups launching. Last year we raised over $2.5M from the judges -- so this should be possible. More here: http://blog.launch.co/blog/i-wonder-if-live-crowdfunding-works-lets-find-out.html

2. SCALE: Have the largest audience in technology. Right now we're setting the room for 2,000 seats/5,000 tickets. That's 3-7x the seats/audience size of TechCruch Disrupt and DEMO.  

3. ACCESSIBILITY: I'm sick of seeing the same rich CEOs, corporate M&A and VCs -- aka my friends! -- at events and none of the folks who build stuff. I loved going to Tim O'Reilly's ETech conference (RIP), Chris Pirillo's Gnomedex (RIP) and the old-skool, intimate SXSW when it was 500 folks back in web 1.0.  Why? Because it was filled with people making stuff.  LAUNCH Festival is going to be for the ballers and the builders.

So today I'm giving away 1,000 tickets to developers, designers and UX people right now. Apply here.

If you're a lawyer, VC, corporate development suit or sales executive, please help me get to breakeven (about $700k) by buying a ticket here.

Questions:

a) What else can we do to disrupt the space?
b) What else could we do to make the event more valuable?
c) Who are the top five speakers you want to hear from?
d) Do you know anyone launching in 100 days? Have them apply: http://festival.launch.co/#competitions

all the best, @jason