Building Wealth through Venture Capital

Preface

While taking some time off after selling his Chicago‐based company, MusicNow, to Circuit City in 2004, founding chairman and CEO Chris Gladwin had a new idea. It came to him while musing about how to store his extensive collection of photos on his personal computer. There just wasn't enough storage on his computer to house all those pictures.

Storing those keepsakes online in the cloud might work, but Gladwin worried they might then, outside of his control, be subject to loss or perhaps hacking. Not surprising, since he's an MIT graduate, Gladwin began reading books on encryption, and a really big new idea came to him that could alter the way data (including his and others' pictures) were stored and secured.

He realized that the execution of his idea would require forming a high‐tech company, putting together a team that could pull it off, and raising a lot of capital. While his MusicNow was a nice little company, a truly high‐technology startup with this big of an idea had not been developed and funded in Chicago in many years. Such startups had been gravitating to places like Silicon Valley, the towns around Boston's Route 128, and the Washington DC metro area, so the decision to try to do all this in Chicago seemed on the surface to be potentially as risky a decision as going after the big idea in the first place.

Chicago, like many other cities, had once been a hub of bustling entrepreneurship, with many hard‐driving, creative, fearless minds conjuring up the future. ...