With the "network" of venture capitalist firms and startup incubators able to give you an instant invite to Atlas, it felt like it's made for them (the venture firms) and not the businesses.
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.
Look forward to applying in the near future!
EDIT: was being paranoid. retracted
EDIT: shared below
Just do it and ask forgiveness if someone moans about being OT.
Thats a great insight, thank you. I'll just drop the website (work in progress). Gamma Fi: https://gammafi.com