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Our company's 2014 strategy is all about Chicago.
Hiring developers, designers, project managers - check.
Doubling office space - check.
CoFounder moving to head the Chicago office - check.
Chicago is primed for digital. As a business owner whose company provides digital development from F500 companies like GE, Bloomberg, and Fitch, to startups such as TopList and Zola Books, I believe that the market in Chicago is about to explode (if it hasn't already....)
Here's our reasoning
1.) High unemployment of highly-educated talent.
Chicago is trending at about 8.1% unemployment, way higher than the current national average of 6.4% http://www.bls.gov/web/
This environment is very similar to NYC back in 2008. Back then, there were lots of people laid off from the Financial and Media worlds, with decades of connections and experience, unable to retire because their 401k dropped 40% within a few years, and they needed to do something. So they were forced to innovate. It's no wonder that so much FinTech and MediaTech came out of NYC in the past few years alone. Think Rent-The-Runway, UpWorthy, OutBrain, Kickstarter, gust, SecondMarket....the list goes on. If you look at the management of those companies, it's loaded with people who came out of Finance and Media back from a few years ago.
2.) Corporate earnings are at a record high, and everyone hates it.
Thanks to Icahn and a slew of other activist investors, the huge cash piles corporations are sitting on (ranging from $1.5 Trillion - $2.0 Trillion) are being pushed into investment. Doing otherwise would mean a severe cash buyback or increased dividends, and managers do not like giving money back to investors - it's an admittance that they don't know how to put the money to better use.
Here's a link to St. Louis Federal Reserve, with the chart on Corporate Profits http://research.
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Moreover, for a long time everyone was stashing cash because of the financial crisis. Now, all those good ideas that piled up on the shelves, year over year, are coming out. And they're not coming out slowly - from my viewpoint this is opening of floodgates. If a company didn't do mobile for a few years, suddenly they need 2 or 3+ new apps immediately, with plans for future versions.
3.) Chicago is an education engine
There are over 50 institutions of higher education in Chicago alone: DePaul, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Loyola University - the list goes on. That means a lot of bright young people, with a lot of great access to knowledge, trained in the latest technologies - mobile, application development, user experience, design, etc.
Combine these points and it's clear that Chicago is about to be a powerhouse: you have the money (corporate profits that need to be spent), you have experience (a lot of well-connected out-of-work professionals), and you have a talent pool trained on the latest technologies (graduates from Chicago's colleges).
Put it together and it's a recipe for great opportunities. This is the exact same formula that helped me and Dom choose NYC over SF or LA five years ago. The challenge with San Francisco or Los Angeles is that you're competing too much for expertise and talent with all the other competitors in the marketplace.
Marketplaces like Chicago, Boulder, and Madison offer great talent, great experience, great money, and low level of competition from other technology companies. The major problem? Keeping the talent in-town.
Image: Chicago Downtown via Shutterstock
