The big date approaches for our first Capital Connections event here in Atlanta. The response has been so tremendous that we’ve had to change the venue – we went WAY over the capacity of our original venue. We currently have over 150 entrepreneurs and investors that will be in attendance. Given that we’ve gone to some pretty good lengths to keep the service provider crowd out, that number sounds even bigger. My guess is that we’ll hit 200 before the actual event, which would be awesome!

Over the past two months, I have evangelized this event to hundreds of people. I’ve worked the phones, email, the blogosphere, message boards, and even went door-to-door in some cases. It is pretty easy to see why people get excited about the event – I mean – what’s not to like?

But I keep getting asked this one little annoying question.

How are you getting paid?

Perhaps people ask me that question because they assume that because I’m an entrepreneur, we must be monetizing this effort in some way. However, I don’t think so. I think this question is symptomatic of one of the things that I dislike about the culture here in Atlanta. Before you chastize me, I was born and raised here – so yes, I have a license to vent – I’m not a carpetbagger.

As I’ve blogged about before (and talked about on the StartupLounge.com podcast), one of the things that is wrong with this community is that everyone is walking around with their hand out looking to get paid. It seems to bug people to no end that we aren’t charging a door fee, charging for people to pitch their deal, or instituting some sort of membership fee. I’ve even been told that we should “scale this out nationwide and charge for it.” Blah.

We are trying to tear down the artificial walls in the early-stage community here, not add new ones.

We will get paid in the end the same way every attendee will: a rising tide lifts all boats. By creating a more vibrant early-stage community here in Atlanta, there will be more fun things to invest in, more great people to meet, more jobs created, and more problems to solve. And that, my friends, is what it is all about.

This event is not the answer to everything that ills us in Atlanta – but it does represent a start. It is an artificial process that will hopefully jumpstart a few deals (especially since we’re doing it every quarter.) The real startup ecosystem or process will evolve on its own – it cannot be artificially created. But hopefully, this event can be a catalyst to help ignite the fire.

Cheers.