Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ People in Chicago are more fiscally conservative. People don’t want to throw their money behind a bad idea.
Nothing wrong with that, really. People are kind of too obsessed with the venture capital model, especially millennials. It’s like an annoying generational fad, like a right of passage for entitled brats:
“Dude, did you, like, get funding?
“Yeah dude, we got a seed round, now we’re trying for Series A.”
“Sweet! I just signed up for an incubator in this cool new shared office”
“Awesome, make sure you Instagram it so I can check it out later”
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No, that's not what I meant at all by closed system. It means that, for example, you may not get funding unless you have the right connections with the right people who are providing the funding. They are not keen on any outsiders to their circles even if you are having something that makes money. In places like NYC this is not nearly as much the case, and definitely not the Bay Area. Both NYC and Chicago are more pragmatic in handing out money, but that's not what I meant by this. I was talking about more "Oh, you aren't in our circle so we aren't going to fund you." Not everyone is like this, but Chicago is known as one of the most closed systems. This is consistent with what a handful of my friends who started their own startups in Chicago told me and a few others who do their own small scale investing on the side (small scale angel investing).
There was an article about this in Crains a handful of months ago I need to find and there's been multiple studies on this that Chicago is more conservative than almost every other major metro areas when it comes to this, and it's essentially holding some things back in tech in the area. It was written by the CEO of a local and very successful tech company.