[illini123]

> not because their looking to solve a problem.

This. I am sick and tired of hearing how nobody can get funding in Chicago. There are two problems: 1) most of their ideas suck, even by startup standards (and I've worked with enough startups to have somewhat of a standard). 2) The VCs want to see next-to-impossible business models / traction. I don't like the frothiness going on in other areas right now, but Chicago takes such little risk it's distburing.

Chicago lacks serial entrepreneurs and a true ecosystem. If you read the "results" section of our report, it goes in-depth. I just posted the thing to the HN homepage. We had to censor it for fear of political push-back (it was a very real risk from some very powerful people). I'm happy to share more in person.

[toomuchtodo]

Are you dead set on your health analytics startup? I'm in touch with someone working on healthcare.gov if you'd be interested in participating in that project.

[illini123]

I'd be happy to talk more about that; right now, though, I've been working on the business model / user research for 4-5 months and just scored a decent partnership with the NIH yesterday (I'm doing behavioral health, where the competition is nascent to non-existent).

I've given myself a timeline to get an MVP and hit certain milestone; given that I've been in the health-tech community for a few years, there are a couple of influential people following the traction.

My problem has been coming from a background where full-stack development was never my thing (undergrad in business, M.S. in Library / Information Science). Sure, I can run some bayesian classifiers on a set of data, but my role in enterprises has always been product management / UX with dabbling in programming on an as-needed basis. Never enough to know the things I don't know.

[toomuchtodo]

I can respect that. Got your email, will respond shortly.