I distinctly remember the fear I felt when my aunt and uncle dropped me off on Yale’s campus 35 years ago this fall. I had never visited the school and didn’t know anyone. 
 
As I met people, I realized there weren’t many people like me there. I grew up the son of a Teamsters truck driver in a small farming town of about 800. My parents hadn’t gone to college. My grandparents hadn’t even attended high school after dropping out in junior high to work on the farm. 
 
I wasn’t the only student from that kind of background, but there were few of us. I also recall standing out at the president’s address to the freshman class. It wasn’t due to my height, but how I was dressed. Nearly every young man seemed to be wearing a blue blazer. I had never owned one. 
 
My first couple years, I tried very hard to blend in and not stick out as someone who didn’t belong. Safe to say I was occasionally homesick. 
 
But I also distinctly remember the pride I felt when I logged in to my first email account somewhere around junior year. The opening page declared this was brought to us by the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This amazing new technology was created and housed just down the road from my hometown. Not New York, not Massachusetts, not California, but Illinois. 
 
I felt home-state pride. A bit later, I learned the first commercially successful web browser, Netscape, also came out of research at the U of I. 

My parents visiting me at college for the first time.

As I grow older, I have learned that our state has produced a lot of innovations that drive progress and economic growth around the world. 
 
Unfortunately, I also have learned that too often the financial success of these ideas grew outside of our state. Marc Andreessen studied at U of I but chose to grow Netscape in Silicon Valley. And unfortunately, he is far from alone in making that decision. 
 
There are many factors involved in those decisions, but a common theme for entrepreneurs leaving Illinois is that to grow, they need access to a lot of money. And many of the venture capital firms investing in Illinois entrepreneurs were in California. Their advice after investing in our companies: Move to our backyard. 
 
What I have yet to discover is a single Illinois venture capital firm investing in an Illinois company and telling them they must leave our state. So, we needed to boost the amount of venture capital here to keep more of our entrepreneurs here. 
 
That is the simple logic behind my office’s Illinois Growth and Innovation Fund. We invest in Illinois venture capital firms, and they promise to invest two times those dollars into Illinois companies. That leverage has brought in billions of dollars in investment in Illinois companies. Data captured since inception has shown that our capital commitments have helped create about 20,000 jobs in Illinois. 
 
We are growing jobs, and we also are making money. Our investments are earning just under 10% for the state. We can then reinvest those earnings in other companies or use them for our schools, healthcare, public safety, or roads and bridges. 
 
As a young student, I was proud of the innovation coming out of our state. Today, I am even more proud that we continue to innovate, but that we also help keep more of our entrepreneurs and jobs here in Illinois. 

Sincerely,  
Michael