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

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">On this episode of the Startup of the Year Podcast, we hear from Chris Deutsch, who is the Founder of Lofty Ventures (</span><a href= "https://loftyventures.com/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">loftyventures.com</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">) and the Re-Founder at teaBOT (</span><a href= "https://teabot.com"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">teabot.com</span></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">).</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">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</span> <a href= "https://rex.academy/"><span style= "font-weight: 400;">https://rex.academy/</span></a> <span style= "font-weight: 400;">to learn more! </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lastly, we invite