KATHERINE DAVIS
TECHNOLOGY & HEALTH CARE JOURNALIST
In 2017 Joseph Parisi stood on the famed "Shark Tank" stage to pitch his personal safety startup Guard Llama to Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Kevin O’Leary and the rest of the celebrity investors on the hit ABC show.
Launching a startup and raising venture capital have nearly become one in the same. Many founders will say that it’s almost impossible to launch and scale a company without outside financing, especially if they want to grow it quickly.
At the fourth annual Chicago Venture Summit in early October, Mayor Rahm Emanuel was touting his tenure and the impact it has had on Chicago’s tech and startup scene.
Now that her entire staff is working remotely due to the novel coronavirus crisis, Julie Roth Novack, the co-founder and CEO of events-planning startup PartySlate, has a much different workday.
When news broke on Monday that Michael Ferro was retiring as the chairman of Tronc, confusion swept through Chicago’s media industry.
Josh McGhee was prepping at home for a story assignment back in November when he got a text from a fellow co-worker that he no longer had a job. McGhee, who had been working as a DNAinfo Chicago reporter since 2013, was one of several local journalists who were suddenly out of a job when DNA owner Joe Ricketts abruptly shut down the media company.
RXBARs are one of the most popular nutrition bars on the market right now. They’re simple, healthy and packaged in an aesthetically pleasing way. They’re the pinnacle of millennial diet demands, a reflection of Instagram trends and a product of Chicago’s growing food startup scene.
Come Jan. 1, it will be legal to purchase and possess recreational marijuana in Illinois. And as the new year gets closer, several Chicago cannabis startups are beginning to imagine what the future holds for them under the new law.
Over the last year, Chicagoland has seen an uptick in the number of venture-backed insurance tech startups. Some of them provide comprehensive insurance, while others simplify only one part of the process.
When the workday began on Monday, June 1, the world felt completely different to most.
When longtime Accenture employee Lee Moore accepted a big promotion to run the company’s Midwest operations, he had no idea that he’d be leading a team of 11,000 people during one of the worst pandemics in recent history and a painful cultural movement around racial injustice.
It’s the beginning of April and Julie Roth Novack, the founder and CEO of Chicago-based PartySlate, is scrambling to apply for a small business loan as she works to keep her events startup afloat amid the Covid-19 crisis.
Unlike some other industries, tech companies have garnered a reputation for creating and maintaining outstanding offices, oftentimes putting unique design, personalization and comfort front and center.
When it comes to gaining exposure as a budding startup, few avenues are as helpful as an appearance on Shark Tank, the hit reality television series on ABC.
At a City Council meeting last August, where Chicago officials were discussing the future of driverless cars in the city, Alderman Edward M. Burke showed a clip from the film “Back to the Future.”
When Erik Severinghaus decided to take an executive position at SpringCM, a Chicago-based sales contract management software startup, he told his then potential boss that he’d take the job only if he’d have time to complete a goal of his—climb Mount Everest.
When people think of innovation hubs, Ann Arbor, Mich., probably isn’t the first place that pops into their minds. They’ll first think of Silicon Valley, Boston, or maybe even Chicago.