This is an excerpt from today's Beat, our daily back-and-forth on the biggest tech and innovation stories in Chicago. If you'd like this newsletter to hit your inbox every afternoon, sign up here.
Will: Dun dun dun dahhhhh, dum dum, dum dum. Jim, that's me trying to do the Monday Night Football theme.
Anyways, like most people, I have football on the brain. But this is a tech newsletter. So, in honor of the start of the NFL season, we're going hold the first-ever Chicago Tech Ecosystem Fantasy Draft right here in The Beat.
Here's how it works. I pick someone/something, you pick two someones/somethings, and then we snake our way down the draft. What's the goal here? To have, after five picks, a micro-representation of the ecosystem, complete with the people, companies, trends, and resources that make up Chicago tech and are helping drive it forward.
Before we begin, I just have one last piece advice to you and our readers - Don't overthink this. Ok? Let's go...
With my first pick, I'm taking...Chris Gladwin (pictured). As the founder and former CEO of Cleversafe - the cloud storage giant that sold to IBM for $1.3B - Gladwin helped seed 80 new millionaires in the city. And in December, he donated $7.6M to IIT's Computer Science program. (Oh yea, he's also got something new a'brewing). He's a great founder and CEO who understands the value of giving back to the community.
Jim: OK, for my two picks I’m taking Nicole Yeary’s Ms. Tech organization and Pritzker Group VC. Nicole Yeary is doing some really awesome things around promoting and providing resources for women in tech. And the Pritzker Group is one of Chicago’s most active venture firms and has helped fund some of Chicago’s most promising startups.
Will: My second and third picks are....OCA Ventures and BLUE1647. The Chicago-based VC firm is on a hot streak - in the last two and a half years companies that OCA has backed have collectively sold for more than $2 billion - and Blue1647 is doing tremendous work helping to diversify the city's innovation pipeline.
Jim: I’m grabbing Uptake and Project44 with my next two picks. There’s still a lot we don’t know about Uptake, but if they can deliver on their plan to be the IoT backbone behind the industrial sector, they could be a major pillar in the Chicago tech community. And Project44, a logistics startup that wants to revolutionize the supply chain, is my sleeper. I think we’re going to hear a lot more from the young startup soon.
Will: My 4th and 5th picks are....Jellyvision CEO Amanda Lannert (pictured) and Jason Fried's Medium archive. Lannert has pretty much won ever 'Top CEO' award in Chicago and I love the way she values and deploys humor. And the Basecamp CEO and co-founder is behind some of the best tech and startup ramblings/rumblings on the web.
Jim: With my last pick, I’m taking the University of Illinois’ engineering school. The best engineers in the world are coming out of Urbana-Champaign. The more Chicago can tap into that resource, the stronger the city’s tech ecosystem will be.
Will: And with the absolute last pick in the draft? The Cloud Tax.
(Image via IIT, Jellyvision, and Wiki Commons)
