Opinion: A Chicago-centric angel investor's message to the new mayor
By Christopher
Deutsch
May 23, 2023 11:26 AM
Dear Mayor Brandon
Johnson:
Congratulations on your
recent election. Although I did not vote for you, you have my support as
someone who loves our city and is actively investing in its future.
I am a “first-check”
angel investor in Chicago-based startups, providing several million dollars of
my own capital to companies at their earliest stages. Three-quarters of the 83
companies I have backed are led by underrepresented founders. I choose to focus
on our local entrepreneurs because I understand the economic impact of
concentrating my capital here, rather than in Silicon Valley or elsewhere.
My goal is to help our
founders build successful businesses, while adding thousands of jobs to the
local economy. Many of these homegrown entrepreneurs will become
successful enough to create meaningful financial outcomes for their families
and employees, who may then reinvest their capital into new local startups,
creating a local economic flywheel.
There are already
specific examples I can point to, including Cubii, which was sold for $100
million in 2020 and whose founders are now actively investing
in Chicago startups led by underrepresented founders. This is a viable
long-term strategy that admittedly will take decades. For it to work, we must
move quickly to make Chicago competitive once again, so residents choose to
stay and others are enticed to move here from elsewhere.
The pandemic has caused
us all to ask ourselves big questions about where and how we work: “Why am I at
this job?” “Do I enjoy what I do?” But there is one pervasive question I am
hearing again and again from founders that is critical to Chicago’s future: “If
I can work from anywhere now, why am I living here?”
This question is
actively being asked by other business leaders, too, whether they already live
here, such as CME Group CEO Terry Duffy, who just publicly shared his
concerns, or those who might consider moving here.
More people will be
asking themselves that question in response to proposals like those contained
in “First We Get the Money,” or
calls to defund public safety and ignore the fiscal peril facing our
city.
Our entrepreneurs do
not have to be here. They choose Chicago because it is an amazing city with
award-winning restaurants, vibrant neighborhoods, world-class universities,
robust infrastructure, gritty workers and a reasonable cost of living.
But we are at the
precipice of a mass exodus of our best and brightest entrepreneurs and their
employees. These vital individuals increasingly are looking to set down roots
elsewhere as they seek safer streets, lower taxes and better-functioning local
government. Unless we become more competitive, our city is going to lose the
very entrepreneurs we desperately need here.
They are our next
generation of CEOs who eventually will lead Fortune 500 companies and invest
their own dollars, as I do, into our future founders.
If we lose them and the
jobs they represent, while scaring off the CME Groups and prospective corporate
entrants before they even sign leases, will our city be viable five, 10, 20
years from now? Or will we succumb to the same rapid decline and deindustrialization
Detroit experienced?
We cannot let that
happen. The risk of losing our status as a world-class city is real, so it is
urgent that we work together to craft rational and realistic near-term and
long-term solutions to these problems because, in this post-pandemic paradigm,
it has never been easier or more attractive to move to other cities than it is
right now.
Sincerely,
Christopher Deutsch