[kolbe]

Chicago also has a very weak job market in the tech space. Relative to the Bay, Seattle, LA and NY, it has practically zero noteworthy growing and innovative companies.

Most of Chicago's top talent is stuck at places like Boeing or Exelon where they make a good living in the low to mid six figures, but it's really hard to get a huge surge in home prices like in the Bay without employee equity going up 100x, which just doesn't happen with the large mature companies that dominate the landscape in Chicago.

In my experience, this lack of innovation sits squarely on the shoulders of the wealthy in that city. They have expressed very little interest in being educated in the tech space. For example, in 2013, when I tried to explain to them why a bitcoin brokerage could be a good idea, I had to try to educate them in ways that are totally unreasonable. How do you even explain what bitcoin is to someone who only understands basic arithmetic and whose tech chops extend to Excel and web sites? In the end they all just assumed I was pitching a scam, and I don't really blame them, given how the whole thing must just sound fake. But in the Bay, where VCs are run by really intelligent people who can go home to read and understand the white paper and who probably know more than the people they invest in, it's a wonderful starting point.

Lately, VCs like the Pritzker group have really opened up to taking risk at least, but they're kind of just throwing darts randomly into things they don't understand (see Outcome Health). We really need people like Larry Page and Gordon Moore (or whoever, you know what I'm saying) here to help allocate funds in productive ways.