#0093 - Investing In The Midwest With Chris Deutsch Of Lofty Ventures And teaBOT

On this episode of the Startup of the Year Podcast, we hear from Chris Deutsch, who is the Founder of Lofty Ventures (loftyventures.com) and the Re-Founder at teaBOT (teabot.com). Chris has spent over 20 years starting up, investing in and working with early-stage, venture-backed startups in ecommerce, web and mobile applications, enterprise software, and consumer products. Chris is the Founder of Lofty Ventures, which builds long-term relationships with Chicago's next generation of passionate and brilliant founders. He is also currently the Re-founder and Board Director at Y Combinator-backed teaBOT. Organizations around the world such as Google, HubSpot, McKinsey and 1871 leverage teaBOT's Amenity-as-a-Service model to provide tea-making robots to their employees, as well as a means to recruit and retain top talent. We are again continuing our segment where we highlight one startup from our community. In this episode that company is Rex Academy, which offers a concise, turnkey computer science curriculum and learning platform designed to prepare students with 21st-century skills. Rex Academy's project-based curriculum prioritizes student success through individualized experiences. Features such as automatically graded assessments and courses designed to be taught by non-experts make it easy to bring world class computer science instruction to any workforce development organization or school. Visit https://rex.academy/ to learn more!  Lastly, we invite you all to join our community today to access the support, expert advice, and resources you need to elevate your startup by going to: www.est.us/join   Thank you for listening, and as always, please check out the Established website and subscribe to the newsletter at www.est.us Checkout Startup of the Year at www.startupofyear.com Subscribe to the Startup of the Year Daily Deal Flow: www.startupofyear.com/daily-dealflow Subscribe to the Startup of the Year podcast: www.podcast.startupofyear.com Subscribe to the Established YouTube Channel: soty.link/ESTYouTube *** Startup of the Year helps diverse, emerging startups, founding teams, and entrepreneurs push their company to the next level. We are a competition, a global community, and a resource.   Startup of the Year is also a year-long program that searches the country for a geographically diverse set of startups from all backgrounds and pulls them together to compete for the title of Startup of the Year.   The program includes a number of in-person and virtual events, including our annual South By Southwest startup pitch event and competition. All of which culminate at our annual Startup of the Year Summit, where the Startup of the Year winner is announced, along with an opportunity at a potential investment. Established is a consultancy focused on helping organizations with innovation, startup, and communication strategies. It is the power behind Startup of the Year.  Created by the talent responsible for building the Tech.Co brand (acquired by an international publishing company), we are leveraging decades of experience to help our collaborators best further (or create) their brand & accomplish their most important goals.  Connect with us on Twitter - @EstablishedUs and Facebook - facebook.com/established.us