Greg Tepas is the Founder and CEO of CarAdvise, a startup that makes car maintenance easy and transparent. CarAdvise acts as a personal auto repair concierge and advisor for car owners. They provide an unbiased opinion on proposed work and estimated cost to save car owners from the traditional mistrust and stress associated with car repairs.
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Jeff Judge is the Founder and CEO of Bright, a startup that helps SaaS companies quickly understand their core metrics, and gives them the tools to grow faster. Bright just graduated from the 2016 Techstars class here in Chicago. Before founding Bright, Jeff cofounded and led Signal (acquired) and he was an early engineer at Orbitz.
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Rob Royer is the Founder and CEO of Interior Define, a startup that builds furniture on demand and will customize everything, including the size, shape, color, fabric, filling, and frame.
Rob was one of the early employees at Bonobos and took much of what he learned over to Interior Define, which he launched in 2014. Shopping for a big purchase like a couch online without sitting on it beforehand kind of seems crazy so we talk a lot about how they have gotten people over that hesitation. We actually recorded this episode sitting on one of their sofas in their Lincoln Park guideshop.
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Mia Saini is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School and a former reporter for Bloomberg TV. Early last year, Mia quit her job at Bloomberg and her Co-Founder Laura Lisowski quit her job at Facebook to start building Oars + Alps out of 1871.
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Zach Kaplan is the Founder and CEO of Inventables, which makes software and hardware for 3D carving. Their flagship products Easel, Carvey, and X-Carve are used by a new wave of makers to make everything from circuit boards to skate boards. Zach was named a “modern Leonardo” by the Museum of Science and Industry and a 40 under 40 by Crain’s Chicago Business. Inventables has the stated goal of putting a 3D carver in every classroom by the end of the decade.
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Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman
Amanda was named CEO of the Year at the Moxie Awards in 2014 and 2015. Under Amanda’s leadership, Jellyvision has doubled its revenue three out of the last four years.
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Eddie Lou is the CEO and Co-Founder of Shiftgig, a mobile, two-sided labor marketplace connecting large venues in the service and hospitality industries with locally available and previously vetted hourly workers. Shiftgig is one of the leaders in the gig economy, acting as a technology bridge connecting millions of workers with millions of shifts.
Shiftgig has raised $35M in venture funding from many local VCs including Chicago Ventures, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, and Corazon Capital.
Before founding Shiftgig, Eddie was a general partner with OCA Ventures, where he invested in software, consumer internet, and business services companies.
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Dan Wagner is the Founder and CEO of Civis Analytics, a startup that helps companies, non-profits, and campaigns leverage their data to develop smarter strategy, make better decisions, and build stronger, data-driven organizations.
Before founding Civis Analytics, Dan Wagner was the Chief Analytics Officer on President Obama's 2012 campaign, overseeing a 54-person team of analysts, engineers and organizers that provided analytics and technologies for voter contact, digital, paid media, fundraising and communication. After a discussion with Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet Inc., on election night, Dan decided to keep his team together and start a company.
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Tracey Wiedmeyer is the CTO and a Co-Founder of InContext Solutions, the leader in scalable virtual reality (VR) shopping and retail solutions. InContext Solutions lets manufacturers and retailers simulate real in-store shopping situations to ideate, evaluate and activate all types of merchandising, display, layout and other in-store shopping experiences within a VR store environment before implementing them in the real world. Just last month, they closed their Series E round of funding, bringing their total funding to $42.5M.
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Mark Lawrence is the CEO and Co-Founder of SpotHero, an on-demand parking app and website that makes drivers’ lives easier by helping them find and reserve a parking for up to 50% off. Mark along with his co-founders started the company after managing to rack up thousands of dollars in parking tickets. SpotHero is now one of Chicago's bigger consumer startup success stories. They raised $20 million in Series B funding last year, are in 15 cities, and have a team of 120 now.
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Canh Tran is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rippleshot, a startup that detects payment card data breaches. They take a big-data machine learning approach, more common in search, genetics and advertising, and apply it in a novel way for the payment processing industry to help banks, merchants and processors proactively monitor suspicious fraudulent activity and implement smarter fraud risk management strategies when card compromises do occur. It is a massive industry with a lot of room for improvement.
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Raaja Nemani is a Co-Founder and CEO of Bucketfeet, a footwear startup that collaborates with a global community of artists to design limited-edition shoes.
The idea began in Argentina when Aaron Firestein gave Raaja a pair of hand-designed canvas sneakers inspired by the city blocks of Buenos Aires. On the rest of Raaja's journey, these unique looking shoes sparked non-stop conversations across six continents with people of all races, religions, genders, and cultures. Upon returning home, he decided to start Bucketfeet with Aaron.
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Shaily Baranwal is the CEO and Founder of Elevate K-12 and Classblox. Elevate K-12 provides digital instruction and online resources to millions of at-risk students across the US. Since launching in 2008, Elevate K-12 has provided over 1 million hours of online instruction and has averaged a 35 percent increase in student test scores. Shaily's latest product, Classblox, is for consumers and it offers on-demand, online classes taught by real teachers. Students take hour long virtual, interactive classes from vetted teachers in subjects like algebra, Spanish, and ACT prep.
Shaily and her company’s mission is to help ensure that every student gets one-on-one, online instructional support, irrespective of geography, demography and ethnicity.
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Kayne Grau is a Co-Founder and CEO of DRIVIN, a startup changing the way used-car dealers source their used-car inventory. Before founding DRIVIN, Kayne was the CTO at Cars.com.
Using proprietary technology and actionable local market data, DRIVIN sells, sources, acquires and delivers used-car inventory for used-car dealer partners across the country. DRIVIN helps dealers understand what’s selling locally and how to price effectively. DRIVIN has raised $17.5 million from investors including Brad Keywell, Eric Lefkofsky, Mitch Golub, and Columbus Nova Technology Partners.
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Constance Freedman is the Founder and Managing Partner of Moderne Ventures, an early stage venture fund and accelerator investing in technology companies in real estate, mortgage, finance, insurance, and home services. These are multi-trillion dollar industries that make up well over 20% of the US GDP and are ripe for innovation. Prior to launching Moderne Ventures, Constance was the head of Strategic Investments at the National Association of Realtors where she launched and managed its investment arm, Second Century Ventures (SCV), and founded its accelerator program, Reach.
In 2014, Constance was recognized by Crain’s Business in its prestigious 40 under 40 award and was also named on Crain’s Chicago Top Tech 50. In both 2014 and 2015, Constance was recognized on Swanepoel’s Power 200 Most Powerful Individuals in Residential Real Estate and in 2015, named in Inman’s Top 101 in Real Estate.
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Nick Moran is a co-founder and Managing Director of New Stack Ventures and Moran Capital Partners. He also started the very popular The Full Ratchet podcast, where he interviews venture capital and angel investing experts on successful startup fundraising and investing strategy. Nick asked me to interview him for his 100th episode and I thought the content was so good that I decided to repost it here.
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Philip Tadros is a true serial entrepreneur and restauranteur. He is the founder of Doejo, a digital agency, Dollop Coffee, a cafe and bakery, Bow Truss Coffee, a coffee roastery and cafe, The Budlong, a hot chicken restaurant chain, SPACE, a co-working space, and Aquanaut Brewing, a craft brewery. He opened his first coffee shop at 19 after dropping out of college and now runs the largest network of independently owned coffee shops in Chicago.
Crain's recently ran a special report questioning some of Phil's business practices titled "One of Chicago's most connected entrepreneurs has made more than a few enemies". We dive into what really happened in the second half of this episode and what he's learned from the experience.
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Dima Elissa is the founder and CEO of VisMed3D, a startup providing 3D surgical patient replicas for state-of-the-art treatment and training of doctors. Based in Matter, the startup is on the cutting edge of personalized medicine. In addition to her startup, Dima devotes considerable time, energy, and guidance to other women entrepreneurs.
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Star Cunningham is the Founder and CEO of 4DHealthware, a startup that provides artificially intelligent "nudges", SMS and email messages, to patients with chronic conditions based on data collected via 250 wearable devices like bluetooth glucometers and activity trackers. Medicare now reimburses healthcare providers $40 per patient per month for every 20 minutes spent managing care outside a doctor’s office and 4DHealthware interactions count. Star has raised $770,000 to date and is on the verge of becoming the 12th African American woman ever to secure more than a million dollars in venture funding for her tech startup. Before founding, 4DHealthware, Star was at IBM for about 10 years.
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John Roa is a serial tech entrepreneur and long time Chicagoan. He got his entrepreneurial start by creating a computer repair business at 14 and hasn't stopped since. Last year, he sold ÄKTA, his tech-consulting and design firm, to Salesforce. Now John is planning to invest in other Chicago startups via Roa Ventures, a fund that focuses on "early-stage investments, projects and experiments". He has also created the non-profit, Digital Hope, and enjoys playing competitive poker and traveling extensively.
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The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
Stu Grubbs is a Co-Founder and CEO of Infiniscene, a startup building the easiest way to livestream video. They enable gamers, and now Facebook and Youtube streamers, to easily create beautiful live broadcasts in their web browser without any experience or expensive hardware. As Stu mentions during the show, a lot of Chicago startups are new tech solving old problems so it is awesome to to have a startup empowering live streamers being built here. It is definitely both a cutting edge problem and solution.
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David Rabie is the Founder and CEO of Tovala, the creator of a smart oven that cooks perfectly made meals by baking, boiling and steaming them in under 30 minutes. The meals can either be delivered prepackaged from Tovala or be made using a crowdsourced recipe. Last winter, Tovala graduated from Y-Combinator and a few months ago Tovala launched a successful Kickstarter campaign that raised $255,603 with over 1,000 backers. Before starting Tovala, David was an MBA at Chicago Booth, and he worked for the co-founder and CEO of Veggie Grill and ran Groovy Spoon – a bi-coastal chain of frozen yogurt stores. He also spent time working at Google and Foundation Capital.
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Landon Shoop, along with his wife Jennifer Shoop, started Fizz, a team management tool that makes developing employees easy. At his old job, Landon became frustrated while preparing for another yearly performance review and he decided there must be something better. Together they developed a HR tech platform that allows for real-time employee/employer feedback. Landon and Jennifer haven't raised any outside money yet, but they already have some impressive traction. It was great to talk product with promising entrepreneurs just getting started.
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Michael Slaby is the Founder and Head of Mission of Timshel, a startup that has developed a platform called The Groundwork to give organizations and brands more powerful digital tools to analyze all the data they are producing, help them organize supporters, get their message out, and raise money. According to Federal Election Commission records, Hillary Clinton has spent almost $500,000 on Timshel’s services since announcing her candidacy last year. Before starting Timshel, Michael was the CTO of Obama for America in 2008 and Obama’s Chief Integration Officer in 2012, overseeing the campaign's integration of technology, digital strategy, and analytics.
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Jason Kunesh is a co-founder and CEO of Public Good Software, a startup aiming to make donating to non-profits as easy as ordering something on Amazon. Before starting PGS, Jason was the Director of UX for Obama's 2012 reelection campaign and part of the founding team at The Point, which later became Groupon. Jason is also a member of the adjunct faculty at the Starter School, owner of the best Fu Manchu in Chicago, a mentor at Impact Engine, and an advisor to the American Design and Master-Craft Initiative and UX for Good.
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