From GrubHub to Braintree, a look back at the Polsky Center’s legacy of supporting startups
Startups weren’t so sexy 25 years ago. It was pre-Google, pre-dot-com bubble, pre-unicorn. The University of Chicago’s business school, renowned for finance, didn’t offer an entrepreneurship concentration.
Steven Kaplan, a newly tenured professor in 1996, had just started teaching a class in entrepreneurial finance when a student, Jeff Meyers, MBA’97, popped his head into his office and suggested they hold a business plan competition. Kaplan told him to go ahead and organize it.
“I knew nothing about startups. Zero,” Kaplan recalled.
Kaplan rustled up a few judges and $25,000 in prize money, and the New Venture Challenge was born.
Twelve Startups to Compete for at Least $1 Million in the 25th Anniversary Finals of Chicago Booth s New Venture Challenge streetinsider.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from streetinsider.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
CHAPEL HILL – Small businesses in high-income zip codes were affected more negatively than those in other zip codes, because these businesses skew toward providers of non-essential services away from home, found the Kenan Institute in the 2021 Trends in Entrepreneurship report.
That is one example of a key takeaway: for small businesses, much like the broader economy, an economic recovery following the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States has been a k-shaped one, where some businesses are thriving and others are dying.
In aggregate, small business revenue remains more than 20 percent lower than where it was in January 2020, prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the report found, using data from Womply accessed through Opportunity Insights.