As I mentioned in my last post, our next Capital Lounge event is this Wednesday, 8/27. This is going to be far and away the best event we’ve done, on so many levels. More quality deals, more investors (4 to 1 company to investor ratio), and a couple of pretty big announcements, including one in particular that, to quote Mike Blake, that will “change the face of of the Atlanta early stage capital ecosystem.”

If you’ve ever planned a big event before, you obviously know all of the logistics and planning that go into it. CapitalLounge is no different. It’s a ton of work, for sure. But one thing that we do that many other groups don’t do is vet the attendees. This adds an order of magnitude to the effort required to pull off this event.

A key reason for the success of the CapitalLounge event is our vigilant effort to restrict attendance to direct capital providers and entrepreneurs with fast-growth potential. Investors and entrepreneurs are able to get maximum value from the event when they can spend their time establishing relationships with one another, rather than be distracted by other entities (hordes of service providers, job seekers, low quality deals, investor-wannabe types, etc.)

For the upcoming event, roughly one (1) out of every 4.5 applications was rejected for one reason or another. That’s a lot of filtering – and that equates to a lot of work. We have to do it this way – otherwise, we end up becoming the thing that we are trying change. There can be no sacrifice of the vision.

We get a lot of questions (especially from those whose applications are rejected) about the criteria we use, how we review applications, etc. Even though a lot of this information is automatically emailed to the applicant if their application is denied, I thought it might be instructional to provide a little more insight into how we select entrepreneurs, investors, and observers for this event.

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