Why you should quit your job and crash the party
chicagobusiness.com
chicagobusiness.com
"Mr. Leshner thought MelonCard wouldn’t be able to put together a deal in Chicago nearly as fast: “Chicago moves slower. It takes seven meetings (to make a deal), and there’s more of an old-school focus."
Why do you think this the case? Is it Chicago's financial background? Is it the Midwest thing? What keeps it from being one of the startup hubs? All the factors are here: Close to excellent universities, tons of money floating around, culture, etc. (maybe not so great weather). People used to say that it lacked a big, successful startup to act as an anchor, now we have Groupon. So what gives?
a lot of it is chicken and egg - the top talent doesn't see chicago as a place to go to achieve your startup dreams so they don't come here, and chicago won't be that place until people come here. groupon - meh. barely a tech company in my opinion, and (correct me if I'm wrong) smart, ambitious, top-notch coders aren't really banging down their door for a software engineering job.
that being said, lightbank now has plenty of money to spread around, and there is an incubator or two to get things going. can't do much about the weather though.
Not so fast. The toughest and most challenging alignment to get is paying customers. Everything else is easy in comparison