A boost to Chicago entrepreneurship
There was a small nod to Chicago smarts when Nate Silver turned his knack for baseball stats into the brilliant distillation of political polling that was fivethirtyeight.com, since absorbed by the New York Times. Nice, Nate! But on a much richer scale is December’s almost-purchase of made-in-Chicago bargain site Groupon for a non-discount $6 billion, which the locals spurned because they thought they could do better. Thirty-year-old Andrew Mason—whose ambitions to create a site, The Point, that aided collective action mutated into Groupon, with its 3,100 employees, 1,000 of them local—could be the smiling poster boy of a new Lake Silicon called Chicago. We could use the Jobs.
Audience choice:
Cheap stuff, Jobs, Nothing (TIE)
Others that were mentioned a few times, amused us or seemed especially weird:
“I could live on them!”
“It has heralded the phrase ‘Gettin’ My Group-on'”
