By: Mark Glennon*
Chicago area companies raised $2.2 billion of venture capital in 2019 according recently released reports. That’s up from $1.9 billion in 2018, $2 billion in 2017 and $1.3 billion in 2016.
Those are particularly large and welcome numbers when you consider that the vast majority of that funding goes straight into payroll – for cutting edge jobs that people enjoy in innovative, young companies. And data indicate that returns for venture capital have been better in our area than in other tech centers. If you want to list things going well in Chicagoland, venture capital and the tech startups they fund are surely among them.
The sector’s expansion over the last couple decades has been remarkable, which I talked about with Maura O’Hara, Executive Director of the Illinois Venture Capital Association. Fifteen or twenty years ago, “a good year saw 50 companies funded,” she said. “To now have almost 300 companies funded and to recognize that companies at all stages are finding VC investors signals a new age of maturity in our tech ecosystem.”
Things were still more sparse if you go back even earlier. In 1997 I started and ran for a few years a regular conference connecting startups with venture capital investors – sort of an early, bigger version of Shark Tank. We struggled each year to find 15 or so worthy companies. Investors had to help train the entrepreneurs how to make a pitch to investors – something it seems like every high school kid knows today.
How did the sector grow from that to what it is now?
It wasn’t the vision of a central planner in City Hall, Springfield or Washington. Minimal taxpayer money went into the effort. In fact, with only a few exceptions, government at all levels helped by staying away.
It resulted, instead, from the force described so perfectly forty years ago by economist Milton Friedman, summarized in a two-minute video. “Not a single person in the world” could make a pencil, he said. “Literally thousands of people cooperated to make it…. There was no commissar sending out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system: the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate.”
If you’ve never seen the short video, watch it below. It’s among the finest lessons ever in economics.
Like Friedman’s pencil, thousands of people collaborated to make Chicago’s startup sector. They came from from service providers, universities, corporations and more. Most important, an assemblage of determined, talented people in the startups themselves, particularly in recent years, lifted the sector to an entirely new level and perfected the ecosystem.
It was the free market that brought them together and directed their efforts.
They’re still at it. It’s still working.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
Hopefully, all media will get the message, in Illinois, too.
Ted joined Tom Miller of WJPF to talk about Illinois’ highest-in-the-nation property taxes, why lawmakers don’t want to touch the tax’s cost drivers, just how much Illinoisans’ tax burden has grown over the decades, why Gov. Pritzker failed to meet his promise to reform property taxes, and more.
Ted joined Dan and Amy to talk about the free speech controversy brewing in Wilmette due to the city’s refusal to fly a religious freedom flag, the city’s left-wing excesses and the growing culture war, the latest money spent on the illegal immigrant crisis, and more.
Weekly crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department: Report through 4/14/2024.
Let’s hope our school teachers see that video. They seem to have no understanding of how the world works on those things, which is why our young people are so attracted to Socialism. It should be required material in our schools.
Even if they do, they’ll just blame whomever it is their union tells them to blame. It’s really no wonder that the youth of today lack critical thinking skills, considering most of their “educators” can’t think for themselves.
Yup. We need more capital. Hundreds and hundreds of seed stage investments turn into two or three platform companies that drive the ecosystem. In 2007 when I started Hyde Park Angels, it was very very hard to get deal flow like you said it was in 1997. Today, that’s not the problem. The one thing that Chicago has trouble doing on the fund side is raising capital. Guys like Troy Henikoff, Steve Miller and Jim Dugan would be running several consecutive $100MM or more funds if they were in the Valley. It took us 2.5 yrs to raise $11MM and… Read more »
It sounds like you are unhappy that the government wouldn’t give you any money and that the marketplace is wrong about not giving enough capital to our area.
That’s great news.