Hiya, I'm Patrick and I work on Atlas. I'm sorry about that -- that rejection appears to have been a mistake; I'll fix it for you (check your inbox in a few minutes, please) and look into fixing the underlying cause more broadly.

Thanks, Patrick! You've made a fan out of me.

I looked at Atlas this week, in large part because I have a healthy respect for 'patio11, but waiting to be approved when I can just file in Delaware with somebody like HBS and have it done in three days didn't really make sense to me right now. ($5K in AWS credits would be awesome--for some ventures I've done. This one, meh, whatever.)

This goes for anyone on HN -- feel free to email me directly. I'm (my HN username)@stripe.com I'm happy to expedite things if e.g. they're time sensitive for you.

Thanks Patrick; this is the first time I've heard of Atlas and it looks like a great service. Is there a floor of what you expect from applicants, i.e., is a website showing some viable product required before an applicant would be considered competitive?

It's not a competition.

Investors have some limited pool of capital or bandwidth and want to conserve it for the companies they think are most likely to be successful. We are not constrained in this fashion.

We need to know what the business intends to actually do, mostly for compliance reasons. A working website or prototype we could look at makes this easier, but we know there are a lot of ways early stage startups get to market. We can be flexible -- if you don't have a website but do have a deck, we can evaluate that.

We (and our partners) have a notion of what companies are a good fit for Atlas, and it's not quite as broad as "every business we could legally transact with." It's described in more detail in the FAQ, but broadly speaking we're looking for businesses that are intrinsically international and/or ambitious and technology-enabled.

The world needs more hair salons, too, but we'd probably not work with a hair salon at the current moment in time. We're not confident that the thing we are building is appropriate to their needs yet, and want to stay focused while making something for our core audience.

That helps clarify things for me. I did find more information in the FAQ, but I would suggest making it easier to find. Maybe a simple Is Stripe Atlas right for my business? link in the "Ready to join Stripe Atlas?" section.

Look forward to applying in the near future!

Right on--cool that you're doing that. My stuff already turned around, but I'll give it another look next time around if need be.

That's interesting; I have an Atlas invite that I'm about to use but I do not have a workable business...yet. I didn't even realized they "rejected" people, I thought it was more of a waiting list type of thing.

With all of the venture firms in the "network" I'm wondering if there is anything suspect with incorporating through them (ie. Equity percentages) but I'm probably just being paranoid. Feel free to share any detail after you use your invite.

EDIT: was being paranoid. retracted

What's your route to "legitimize the old-fashioned way". Is it a case of incorporating the C-Corp and calling up Silicon Valley Bank yourself?

Yes but I'm not knowledgeable about how to incorporate so I have a lawyer friend who's gonna help. Atlas was mainly for convenience and the free AWS credits.

So what's your business?

Well I didn't think this was a place to market myself and it's not incorporated or anything so there isn't any benefit to share yet, is there?

EDIT: shared below

I'd take the opposite approach if anyone ever asked me what my business was - every interaction is an opportunity to refine and tighten the elevator pitch.

Just do it and ask forgiveness if someone moans about being OT.

> an opportunity to refine and tighten the elevator pitch

Thats a great insight, thank you. I'll just drop the website (work in progress). Gamma Fi: https://gammafi.com

IMO the first thing that you should have on your website is an e-mail collection mechanism. I want to sign up to know when you have a product because this looks promising.

damn, I have a hard timeline to get launched in August but will try to throw something up soon because you are right.

I feel I've been MVP-ed by your website (not that there's anything wrong with this.) Every link led to a 404 but since I clicked on every link to see if that were the case, I'm guessing my site visit didn't tell you anything about what I was interested in the most. Sorry about that.

Yup. I threw that up quickly and haven't had time to finish (been finishing up the product). I put it up just for Atlas

Way to you go, OP. That's four new people who never you existed who now care about you (as ephemeral as this may be.)

Your logo is quite similar to Google's, enough that I was momentarily confused opening the website.

When do you think you'll have a working demo? Would love to show this to someone on my team.

I've took the whole month of July off to finish this up with the goal to have it finished by August 1st

Looks great! Who did your website?

thanks. I did :)

how long have you been working on it? have you shown it to any potential customers yet?

I've been working on it since December. We've been showing it some people in relevant positions and getting feedback. I literally threw up a website to sign up for Atlas so it wasn't meant to be marketable just yet