A three-day startup convention scheduled to take place in India, which had been dubbed “the world's largest startup funding event,” has turned out to be a massive hoax. The World Startup Convention, organized by investors Luke Talwar and Arjun Chaudhary, was scheduled for the weekend of March 24-26 in the town of Greater Noida, near New Delhi.
The aim of the convention was supposedly to offer a platform for the world's startup promoters to connect with potential investors and experts from the third sector to obtain financing. The event had been promoted through various 'influencers'. Previous announcements ensured that great figures from the technology sector would attend the congress: the CEO of SoftBank, Masayoshi Son; the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai; the president of the Adani group, Gautam Adani; or the founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk. All lie.
The organizers had also produced posters featuring various Indian government ministers, suggesting that several of them would also be in attendance over the weekend.
However, when push came to shove, the World Startup Convention turned out to be a complete scam. Beyond the poor organization, which caused moments of chaos when the events began, neither international investors nor the promised ministers showed up. Furthermore, the marketing of the convention was shown to be beyond deceptive.
In fact, several experts have already turned the World Startup Convention into a paradigmatic case of an event that, in reality, is a scam and have classified it as the Fyre Festival of new technologies.
Many of the attendees came to the congress from other cities in India, spending large sums of money on travel, accommodation and registration. After waiting in long lines to complete a tedious registration process, attendees were stunned to find hardly any investors at the India Expo Center in Greater Noida.
In addition, the quality of the programs and conferences were also mediocre, not to mention the absence of all the great champions of new technologies that had been announced and did not show up.
The general indignation reached such a point that some attendees, furious, ended up filing complaints with the police. The organic products company Bambrew, which sponsored the event with $60,000, is considering legal action.
The co-founder of the event, Arjun Chaudhary, was in charge of publicly defending the congress. “There were a lot of high-profile investors who, when they saw the initial drama, immediately walked out,” he told The Indian Express.
In addition, Chaudhary has also explained that the aggressive protests of many of the attendees forced an Indian government minister whose identity has not been revealed to cancel their attendance at the last moment.
This is not the first time that influencers or content creators from India have been accused of promoting irresponsible events. In recent months, several have been reported for advertising related to cryptocurrencies or online games.
Bestselling writer with 2.2 million Instagram followers, Ankur Warikoo, has denied any direct involvement in the event. This influencer has assured that his team asked the organizers on several occasions to withdraw the ads in which he appeared, after he disassociated himself from the event in January.
However, according to his version, they never complied. Many others have refused to comment on their involvement in the scam. In January, India's Ministry of Consumer Affairs passed a regulation saying that this type of misleading promotion can lead to fines of up to $60,700 or account suspension for up to two years.
