“This is like you’re holding a loaded gun to my head and you’re promising that you won’t pull the trigger,” I said to one of our lead investors with regard to their financing agreement which penalized the company’s success at best and, at worst, sealed our fate. He reassured me that the investment group was…
As an organizer for the next Startup Weekend in Chicago, I’m passionate about bringing together people from a wide array of different backgrounds to support them in building great things. If you can imagine being able to take a great idea and spin it around into actionable next steps towards a viable business within 54…
It’s Saturday afternoon, and amid cold pizza, micro brews, and half-eaten donuts, teams of three or four sit in front of laptops, heads poking up intermittently to scan a whiteboard full of vision statements, UX questions, and feature lists. This is the scene of the first hackathon at the newly opened 1871, the co-working-space-meets-tech-startup-beehive and Code Academy…
Photo credit: Taylor Castle Photography We’re thrilled to announce the keynote speaker of the next Technori Pitch on May 29, 2012 will be Nick Kokonas, the business visionary behind Chicago’s haute cuisine standard bearers Alinea, Next, and The Aviary. Foodies across the country are well-acquainted with the iconic names of Alinea, Next, and The Aviary.…
It started out as a joke between two friends: since Instagram and Pinterest are the hottest properties out there, wouldn’t it be funny to just mash the two together? But if the friends happen to be programming nerds, like Brandon Leonardo and Pek Pongpaet, co-founder of Tapisto that creates mobile websites for small businesses, the punchline you get is Pinstagram.co,…
I constantly meet people who learned how to program by teaching themselves or taking a few classes. They learned how to code, but are struggling with how to start and actually make money. They typically don’t have in-depth portfolios that allow them to charge much for their services, and they are afraid to ask for…
The purchase of Instagram by Facebook has been covered extensively by all sorts of media outlets. And for good reason. $1 billion is a lot of money to pay for a small company that isn’t generating any revenue. The conversations have ranged from: “this is completely crazy” to “it’s a justified purchase” and every conceivable…
We had yet another full house and successful April Technori Pitch at the Chase Auditorium yesterday evening! The Keynote We kicked the evening off with keynote speaker Harry Gottlieb, the Founder of Jellyvision Lab and Jellyvision Games. He presented a demo of the upcoming Facebook video game “You Don’t Know Jack,” which initially started as…
The Master, The Mentor, and The Best Mate If you’ve spent any time in corporate America, then you’ve probably heard about 360 Feedback. It’s basically a way for middle management to get feedback from “all around,” including from their superiors, fellow managers, and direct reports. When you’re starting your own venture, however, you don’t have…