chicago-tech
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Jason VandeBoom Built a $250 Million Company $35 at a Time
He arrived in Chicago to study fine art, sold his first piece of software for $35, and spent 13 years declining the usual startup script. The patience became his advantage - and then his hardest thing to preserve.
Maria Katris Learned the Future of Work Behind a Pharmacy Counter
Before Built In connected millions of people with tech companies, Katris learned business at her parents' neighborhood pharmacy: know the community, mind the details, and build something worth caring about.
Adam Calica Built a Job Board by Listening to the Wrong Part of the Website
A forum’s busiest threads told Adam Calica and his co-founder what their company really was. Fifteen years later, Built In is still following that signal - from Chicago startups to the strange new labor market inside AI search.
Peter Hadlaw and the Quiet Machinery Behind Getting Paid
Tesorio's founding engineer works where machine learning meets the stubborn rituals of accounts receivable. His other lens is literal: a camera trained on city light, small details and the world beyond the spreadsheet.
Doug Morse-Schindler Bet the Company on the Last Mile
Before HealthJoy served more than a million members, its president rebuilt a sailboat, survived a bruising pivot and spent six months earning one customer’s trust. His career is an argument that distribution is not the dull part of invention - it is where invention becomes useful.
Erich Kerekes Put Prayer on the Product Roadmap
He left McKinsey before a promotion, stayed in San Francisco without a salary, and helped build an app that counts completed prayers instead of captured attention. The contradictions are the point.
Dan Campbell and the Architecture of Useful Friction
He helped turn three consultants' irritation with inflexible compliance software into a platform built to bend. A decade later, LogicGate's co-founder is still asking the architect's favorite question: what should remain changeable?
Keval Baxi and the Business of Looking Before You Build
The Codal co-founder built a global consultancy by treating every digital project like a shop with a front door, a floor plan and customers who will quietly leave if nobody studies how they move.
Manu Sivanandam Has Spent a Career Turning Complexity Into a Customer Story
From Orbitz deal rooms to immigration operations and software for the trades, Manu Sivanandam has built a career around a durable idea: understand the complicated system, then make it useful to the person at the other end.
Edward Vesely Has Spent a Career Turning Code Into Commerce
He began at IBM writing software, then built a career explaining why technical products matter. Four decades, two complementary degrees and one aptly titled book later, Edward Vesely is still working the seam between the machine room and the market.
Lori McInerney Makes Complex Software Sound Human
After a career spent marketing jobs, screens, insights, and software, Tacton's global CMO is tackling a stubborn industrial problem: how to make a complicated sale feel clear.
Erhan Musaoglu Bet on the Warehouse Before It Was Cool
He arrived in Chicago with a warehouse product, no outside investment and a $30-a-day household budget. The useful part of Erhan Musaoglu’s story is not the hardship. It is how often he let the market rewrite the plan.
Giovanni Farese Is Building the Missing Layer Between Small Businesses and AI
From a law degree and a decade in ICT operations to a $25 million growth round, the Webidoo CEO has built his career around one stubborn question: how do you make sophisticated technology useful to a small business on Monday morning?
Godard Abel
Godard Abel is the co-founder and CEO of G2, the software review platform that brought Yelp-style peer reviews to enterprise software buying. A third-generation entrepreneur born in Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, he built and sold two SaaS companies before G2: BigMachines (acquired by Oracle for a reported $400M+) and SteelBrick (acquired by Salesforce). At G2 he has raised more than $260M, weathered a near-bankruptcy earlier in his career, and is now steering the company through the AI wave with its buying agent Monty and the 2026 acquisition of Gartner's Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice.
Mathew Elenjickal
Mathew (Matt) Elenjickal is the founder and CEO of FourKites, the Chicago-based supply chain visibility company he started in 2014 after realizing he could track a pair of Amazon shoes to the doorstep but not a $100,000 shipment of industrial equipment. A mechanical engineer from Kerala turned logistics-software operator, he spent seven years at i2 Technologies and Oracle before building FourKites into a platform that now tracks more than 3.2 million supply chain events a day for 1,600+ global brands. He has raised roughly $247 million across four rounds and is now pushing the company past dashboards into AI-native orchestration with products like the Intelligent Control Tower and Loft.
Lucas Roh
Lucas Roh is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist who founded and runs MetalSoft, a Chicago-based startup whose software automates bare metal data centers - turning racks of multi-vendor switches, servers, and storage into cloud-like, on-demand infrastructure. A former Argonne National Laboratory researcher in automatic differentiation, he built the global web host Hostway (1998-2013), launched the big data cloud Bigstep, and spun MetalSoft out of Hostway's internal tooling in 2019. In December 2022 MetalSoft raised a $16 million Series A led by DNS Capital.
Pete Foley
Pete Foley is a serial enterprise-software entrepreneur and the co-founder of ModelOp, the Chicago-based company that built one of the first platforms for governing AI models the way banks govern money. Over a 35-year career he has run and exited a string of infrastructure companies - Infoblox, PortAuthority (to Websense), RingCube (to Citrix), Graphite Systems (to EMC) - before betting that the hardest problem in artificial intelligence would not be building models but trusting them. He served as ModelOp's CEO from its founding and now supports the company from its board of directors.