I’m finally beginning to recover from last night’s CapitalLounge event, which was awesome.  Great turnout, and based upon my very informal survey of people as they were leaving at the end of the night, there were lots of facilitated connections. Thanks to everyone for coming and hanging out with us.

Urvaksh did a cool writeup on it as well.  He brought along an Atlanta Business Chronicle photographer as well … hoping to see some cool shots soon!  We should have the pics from our own photographer up on the site by next week …

Thanks to Allen Ulbricht from PeachPods And Anna McCullough from Adams Capital for jumping in and helping out at the badge table.  Man, that was a mess!  Lesson: Don’t let me and Blake manage the badges - that’s just a goat rodeo waiting to happen.

The next event will be in late May or early June, most likely.  We’ve also posted the date of the next PitchCamp session … if you are interested in attending, sign up now, it will fill up fast with only 12 slots available.

Cheers.

We’ll be holding a special edition of Startup Gauntlet just before our CapitalLounge event this Wednesday.  Space is limited to 12 startups and is first come, first serve. The focus on this edition of Startup Gauntlet will not be the usual 5 minute fast pitch with some slides.  This will be the “elevator pitch”.

E.g. “Hi, how are you?”  “Great!”  “So who are you, and what the hell does your company do?  And please don’t cling to me for 20 minutes trying to explain it.”

The only stipulation is that you must already be accepted for attendance at CapitalLounge that night.

For more information, or to RSVP check it out:

http://www.startupgauntlet.com

Cheers.

Unfortunately, we just received word that our normal location for CapitalLounge (The Pavillion of Dunwoody) has had to close their doors due to a disagreement with their landlord.  So, for our upcoming event on Wednesday, Februrary 25th, we have had to change the venue.

If you’ve already applied and been accepted to attend, you should receive an email tonight with directions to the new location.   If for some reason you do not receive an email tonight, check your spam folder (doh!), or go to the StartupLounge.com web site and pull up the event details page - if you’re logged in, you’ll see the information on the new location there.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to seeing everyone on the 25th!

Cheers.

Due to logistics, we’ve had to change the event venue from the Galleria to the ADTC - same time - 2pm.

Let me repeat – PitchCamp will NOT be held at the Galleria, but on the 3rd Floor (Hodges Room) at the ATDC. You can get address/map info here:

http://www.atdc.org/contact/

Thanks to Lance and crew at the ATDC for helping us out!

Cheers.

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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