Women ‘are routinely overlooked for awards,’ says Melinda Gates as her Pivotal Ventures company backs the forthcoming Carol Shields Prize for Fiction.
Image – iStockphoto: Alex Linch
Gates: ‘Ours Will Be a More Equal Society’
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction may not be a literary or publishing award you know, and that’s because it has yet to be awarded.
Today (January 15), however, the program has announced a donation from Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures investment and incubation firm, a handsome US$250,000, which is sure to help make this specialized awards program make a viable start on its mission to recognize the work of women and nonbinary writers in Canada and the United States.
Photo: P33
A new study just found that Chicago area startups provide investors the best return-on-investment (ROI) for their deals.
On Thursday, P33, World Business Chicago and ChicagoNEXT released “2020 Chicago VC Ecosystem,” a report that analyzed PitchBook data from 2006 to the end of the third quarter in 2020 to reveal that for the fourth year in a row Chicago-area companies offer investors the highest ROI. The Chicago area which researchers defined as all of Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin awarded investors an average return 4.88 times higher than their initial investment.
P33 CEO Brad Henderson said the Chicago area’s high ROI is indicative of the quality of companies coming from the region.