Entrepreneurship in the Midwest

Posted by Jeff Carter
on April 24th, 2012

Recently I was part of a panel discussion on entrepreneurship in the midwest, specifically Chicago. We were hosted at the Union League Club by David Lynam and Todd Hext. The club actually has a “club” that is devoted to entrepreneurship. Neat.

One of the panelists was Raman Chadha. He ran the DePaul Coleman Center of Entrepreneurship for the last nine years. Some of his students were at the lunch. Interestingly, there were 220 people there. I bet five years ago when I co-founded Hyde Park Angels, we couldn’t have gotten ten people to come to a lunch like that.

Here is a link to a blog post the student did on our lunch. As I circulate through the midwest and south, I speak with people about their start up communities. What do they have going? What do they lack? What are they seeing? Are people returning or leaving? Are various levels of the community engaged? And, are their risk takers willing to write a check and take a chance on some unproven business? I think Justin wrote a pretty good summary of what we spoke about.

In Chicago at least, there are things starting to simmer. It’s like being in other hot entrepreneurship areas at the very beginning. The ecosystem here is starting to come together. We need to do more of course. But we have momentum.

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