News

healthcare

How Livongo Just Opened the Floodgate to a Digital Healthcare Wave

In the future, when we analyze moments in time when true innovation transformed an industry, we’ll remember an event that happened just a couple of weeks ago: Livongo’sIPO. By the end of its trading debut — which left the company valued at $3.4 billion — Livongo proved two things: that it’s possible to empower people to live healthier […]

August 12, 2019 By Pete Wilkins
equity

Why Educating Startup Employees About Equity Is As Important As Giving It

This is the final article in a three-part series on the benefits of giving all startup employees equity. See the first piece here and the second one here. A year after I moved to Chicago, I attended a women’s networking event, where an employee of a recently-acquired startup entered the room. Folks were excited to see her, congratulating […]

August 9, 2019 By Heidi Craun
Michigan

Why Michigan Could Become a Startup Powerhouse

The unicorns in Michigan demonstrate a fertile startup ecosystem with unlimited opportunities. A couple weeks ago, StockX became the state’s newest in a quickly-growing cohort of unicorns, which includes two other startups that also earned the elite status this year. In February, OneStream Software announced that it had not only become a unicorn but that it is profitable as well, an achievement […]

John Higginson

Video Games, a Single Mom, and “Brilliant Assholes”: How this CTO Became a Successful Tech (and Diversity) Leader

Get to know John John Higginson is the CTO at Enova, a large publicly-traded Chicago FinTech company that’s extended over $20B in credit to customers worldwide. At Enova, John is responsible for driving the company’s technology strategy to leverage advanced digital experiences and data science to deliver on its mission to help hard-working people access […]

July 18, 2019 By Heidi Craun
equity

How Startup Equity Can Impact the Average Tech Employee

When the first startup I worked for was acquired in 2010, my equity—which I did not have full appreciation of up until that point—cashed out on the lower end of the four-figure range. That is not the level of value that we tend to get excited about when we talk about startup equity, but it […]

June 30, 2019 By Heidi Craun
equity

Why Chicago Needs to Be More Vocal About Equity to Compete Nationally

This is the first article in a three-part series on the benefits of giving all startup employees equity. The next article will explore the opportunity Chicago has to leverage equity to create more founders and people capable of taking risks on very early-stage companies. Last month, Chicago Inno published an article on why some startups choose to bootstrap rather […]

May 25, 2019 By Heidi Craun
Anjoo Rai-Marchant

Why This Executive Challenges Startups to Get Engineers in Front of Customers

Getting to know Anjoo Anjoo Rai-Marchant served as the COO at HighGround, which was acquired last year by YouEarnedIt. With her combination of business and technical acumen, she currently advises companies and entrepreneurs in addition to serving as an independent board member of SciArt Software, a company focused on generative design. With over 20 years […]

May 23, 2019 By Heidi Craun
venture returns

Why The Midwest Drives Top Venture Returns

While startup and venture performance in the Bay Area is a valuable datapoint that provides meaningful insights into our industry, I recommend a different strategy for evaluating our respective ecosystems’ health. To get an actionable — not to mention less daunting — perspective of our performance, we must look beyond the Bay and across all […]

May 18, 2019 By Pete Wilkins
2019 Midwest Startup and Venture Capital Market Analysis

Midwest Startup & VC Market Analysis (2019)

The HPA team is excited to bring you the 2019 edition of our annual Midwest Startup and Venture Capital Market Analysis. In partnership with PitchBook, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), and CBRE, our team conducted a deep dive analysis into the Midwest VC ecosystem. We leveraged these partners’ data and data from the U.S. Census, the […]

May 9, 2019 By Cate LeSourd