Madelyn Rutter is the Director of Collaboration at TechNexus.

She supports the Venture Collaborative with everything founder and partner success. That means growth, incubation, marketing, branding, and community, and helping corporate innovators achieve their goals by inspiring them to connect with the right entrepreneurs at the right time.

Rich is the CEO and Co-Founder of New Era ADR, a VC-backed technology company saving precious time and money for individuals and businesses, bringing long-desired yet never-before-seen certainty and predictability to the legal dispute process, up to 90% reductions in time and cost, and revolutionizing how disputes are resolved in the U.S.

Previously, he served on executive teams of two VC-backed technology companies that he helped build and scale through rapid growth and one acquisition so far. Before that, he led market development in Asian markets for two companies. 

Manifest enables seamless 401(k) transfers - maximizing retirement outcomes by reducing rollover administrative hurdles. Their team is building the infrastructure to digitize retirement transfers. 

Fox & Robin is an activewear brand that creates top quality products for all levels of activity, whether you're doing high intensity training or, well...not. As a Benefit Corporation, they are committed to conducting business in an ethical and transparent manner.

Ira Weiss is the General Partner at Hyde Park Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on high-growth, mid-continent technology startups. Ira is also a Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship and Accounting at The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.

In this episode, we discussed the current market downturn and it's impact on  early-stage investing. 

Amplify offers end-to-end strategy, solution design and tactical execution of your optimal revenue solution.

• Strategy: Refining your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy based on your industry, customer profile, value prop and competitive position
• Platform: Combining best in class processes, tools, and analytics to achieve and measure results
• Talent & Enablement: Designing the optimal talent and enablement strategy for scalable growth
• Channels: Implementing a targeted channel partner strategy to expand your pipeline

oak9.io is the security leader for all things cloud native. Their platform finds, analyzes and automatically remediates cloud infrastructure security and compliance issues in real-time, continuously learning and monitoring infrastructure as code (IaC) as changes occur - the only cloud native security solution supporting devsecops throughout the entire development cycle.

oak9 bridges the gap between dev and security, ensuring dev workloads and architecture are secure by design, while giving security teams complete visibility into the changes dev teams are making day over day, sprint over sprint.

oak9 has raised capital from some of the top VC's in the world, including Menlo Ventures. 

For more leanings on Infrastructure-as-code, please see:

• Red Hat primer on IAC
• Primer on DevOps
• Cloud Primer
• Primer on Hashicorp

With a background rooted in private equity and venture capital, Connor takes a data-driven approach to investing, but also enjoys observing cultural shifts in consumer behavior and applying those learnings to new investment themes. Connor works closely with management teams to gain insights and improve performance and enjoys the challenge of understanding complex businesses. Connor is a University of Notre Dame graduate and earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management.

Bridge is a Chicago-based early stage venture fund with a split focus on SaaS and Consumer Brands across a diverse set of end markets. Select portfolio companies include InGoodTaste, EarlyBird, Mack Weldon, Simple Mills, Jiobit, PartySlate, Interior Define, haku, and ConverseNow

Tessa Flippin is the Founder and Managing Partner of Capitalize VC, a pre-seed and seed stage VC fund purpose-built to reduce the racial wealth gap by investing in early-stage Black and Latinx founders, while simultaneously creating access for diverse LPs. 

Tessa began her career in venture capital as a venture investor at TechNexus, a Chicago-based fund, where she invested in enterprise SaaS technologies at the seed stage. She went on to join Genius Guild Greenhouse Fund as a Venture Capitalist in Residence, investing in Black founders in fintech, health tech and connectivity.

Prior to venture capital, Tessa founded La Plataforma, a fintech payments platform, sending international money transfers throughout Latin America. 

Tessa attended Stanford University for undergrad where she ran Track and Field and joined Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. She went on to receive her MBA from Columbia Business School where she studied entrepreneurship, venture capital and social impact. 

Tessa actively serves on the board of BLCK VC Midwest and the advisory board of Chicago:Blend working to bring diversity to the Midwest tech ecosystem. She is also a member of the Cap Table Coalition investment committee.

86 Repairs is the repair and maintenance management platform built for the restaurant industry. Our tech-enabled solution includes on-demand repair management and preventative maintenance. With 86 Repairs, restaurants have access to data-driven insights and 24/7 support to control their facilities, reduce their R&M costs, and spend less of their team's time on equipment repairs.