The Chicago-area high-tech community

The Chicago-area high-tech community, home to 25 meet-up and incubator groups dedicated to nourishing the then Groupon, Google or Microsoft, has attracted a Silicon Valley-based incubator intent on cultivating 50 companies, creating up to 1,400 high-paying innovation jobs and raising $100 million in venture capital in its first two years.

Plug and Play Tech Center aims to ramp up its new-business cultivation in Chicago to 50 startups and $100 million in VC funding each year, and to partner with civic, business, higher-education, government and fellow entrepreneurial-building leaders to attract entrepreneurs from the eight-state region.

Sorensen, a Lake Forest native who lives in Silicon Valley, directed strategy at art and framing e-tailer Art.com earlier the Chicago-based company was sold for $115 million to Getty Images in 1999. He is meeting in the then and there few weeks with Chicago innovation leaders to pitch Plug and Play's plans.

Plug and Play intends to help fill the area's early-stage funding gap by working with startup companies to develop business plans, staff up their executive ranks, and introduce them to mentors and Silicon Valley venture capital companies.

Plug and Play lets startups rent a cubicle at a time for $500 a month and add space as they need it. No yearly lease is required. It recruits renowned Silicon Valley experts, founders and investors to participate in seminars, a startup boot camp, business-plan pitch competitions and networking events for specific industries just as "clean" tech and cloud computing.

Among the newest efforts to partner Chicago entrepreneurs with investors is Funding Feeding Frenzy. The entrepreneurs behind Funding Feeding Frenzy are Bob Bock, a 48-year-old Highland, Ind., native who operates RJB Investments real-estate business in La Grange, and his fellow real-estate investors Andy Nadler and David Culver. The trio created Extraordinary Success to help entrepreneurs realize their dreams and to host Funding Frenzy events.

Wide range of specialists - sales consultants

Funding Feeding Frenzy invites entrepreneurs to meet with a wide range of specialists - sales consultants and intellectual-property attorneys as so then as venture capitalists and private-equity sources. The first Frenzy event got off the ground on Dec. 8. Another meeting is slated for May 4, and networking events called "Sip at the SYNC" take place each Friday from 3:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the SYNC Research Center at 322 S. Green St. in the West Loop.

"We saw a challenge in this economy for small and startup companies to get traditional loans from banks and the Small Business Administration, and we saw credit-card companies cutting entrepreneurs' lines of credit," said Culver, 43, of the need for new ways of finding capital.