Celebrating HPA Success with Launch of New Website
Our new, powerful HPA website features success stories of our Founders, Members and Partners as we celebrate how our community works together to build a stronger ecosystem.
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Join the HPA Team: We’re Hiring an Analyst!
About HPA HPA is a leading early stage investor. Our People First model leverages world-class operating expertise, a powerful business network, and venture capital to fuel startup success. As a result, our founders transform their businesses into industry leaders, our investors generate best in class returns, and our community experiences job creation and economic growth. […]
HPA’s Talent and HR Resource Guide During COVID-19
HPA recently created a resource guide that aggregated information on finance assistance and business operations. Meanwhile, we continued to monitor news and developed this secondary resource guide that focuses on HR and talent topics, decisions and best practices. Due to the financial impacts of the pandemic, companies are having to make tough business decisions. As […]
HPA Resource Guide During COVID-19
Over the last couple weeks, HPA has been working diligently to build a resource guide with aggregated content. As an organization, we hope to help keep you informed on the latest news with how COVID-19 is affecting our nation and the marketplace. As we all navigate this unprecedented time, we wanted to equip you with […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
11 Under-The-Radar Chicago VCs You Should Know About
In my most-recent Forbes article, I shared about 12 Chicago-based VCs that are behind hot startups both within our region, like G2 Crowd, and beyond, like SpaceX. These firms tend to get a lot of buzz and make national headlines, but they are far from being the only venture investors in Chicago that fuel entrepreneurs. There […]
Breakdown of biggest VC raises in Midwestern states in 2018
As the new year gets underway, 2018’s fundraising numbers are rolling in, allowing us to get a snapshot of how the Midwest’s top startups fared. It was a good year for the Midwest, which we define here as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. Here is a list of each Midwest state’s top VC […]
How Chicago Plans to Be a Global Tech Player Following Amazon HQ2 News
Although Chicago’s bid to become the site of Amazon’s second headquarters (“HQ2”) didn’t win, the tech giant inspired Chicago leaders to build more than a landing spot for one company; leaders are now on a quest to build a landing spot for the most innovative technology companies in the world. The leadership committee that the city assembled […]