Get ready for a fun day exploring and connecting with fellow NuCoord adults on an awesome field trip!
🚀 PERMISSION SLIPS ARE OUT
Join NuCoord for an unforgettable Adult Field Trip Experience to Adler Planetarium during Chicago Tech Week.
We created this experience for curious minds, professionals, entrepreneurs, creatives, career changers, and lifelong learners who want to explore, connect, and experience something new.
Spend the day exploring one of Chicago’s most iconic STEM destinations while connecting with ambitious and like-minded individuals in a fun, engaging, and community-centered environment.
✨ YOUR EXPERIENCE INCLUDES
🌌 Admission to Adler Planetarium
🎥 Planetarium Show
🔭 Exclusive Tour and Access to exhibits and interactive experiences
🎒 NuCoord Field Trip Swag
🧺 Lakeside Picnic & Social (Food and Drinks Included)
🤝 Curated Professional Networking Session
CURATED PROFESSIONAL NETWORKING SESSION
This experience is powered by NuConnect, a professional networking app available on iOS and Android that takes the awkwardness out of networking.
Download NuConnect and before the event, you’ll share your networking goals, interests, and the types of connections you’re looking for. NuConnect will automatically match you with attendees throughout the experience, helping ensure you meet people who align with your personal, professional, and entrepreneurial goals.
Because networking shouldn’t be left to chance.
🧺 LAKESIDE PICNIC & SOCIAL
After our Adler experience, we’ll continue the day with a lakeside picnic and social where attendees can relax, connect, enjoy food, take photos, and build meaningful relationships against the backdrop of Chicago’s beautiful skyline and lakefront.
✨ WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
• Professionals
• Entrepreneurs
• Creatives
• Career Changers
• Tech Enthusiasts
• STEM Enthusiasts
• Students & Lifelong Learners
• Anyone looking to meet great people and experience something new
Whether you’re looking to expand your network, discover new opportunities, learn something new, or simply enjoy a unique experience with an incredible community, this event was designed for you.
🎟️ Space is limited.
Give yourself permission to explore.
Give yourself permission to connect.
Give yourself permission to experience the future.
📅 Saturday, July 25, 11am-2pm (Adler)
2p-5pm Lakeside Picnic
📍 Adler Planetarium
Chicago, Illinois
Only for ages 21+
Presented by NuCoord
Explore. Connect. Experience the Future.
Follow @nucoord on Instagram and Linkedin!
Trade your keyboard for a putter. Join Chicago’s Black tech professionals for an evening of mini golf, craft cocktails, and real connections at Puttery. Whether you’re in engineering, product, design, or building your own thing, come play a round, meet your next collaborator, and celebrate the culture during Tech Week. Casual competition, curated vibes, no swing experience required.
As part of Chicago Tech Week, /dev/color is exploring hosting a lighthearted, community-centered social experience designed to bring together Black technologists, builders, founders, creators, and partners across the Chicago tech ecosystem.
Rather than creating another heavily programmed panel event, the goal is to create an environment focused on authentic connection, visibility, community building, and relationship development.
The event would serve as an opportunity to:
*deepen engagement with existing Chicago members,
*introduce new people to /dev/color,
*strengthen local ecosystem relationships,
*and position /dev/color as an active contributor to Chicago’s growing tech landscape.
/dev/color is a global non-profit career accelerator and community specifically built for Black software engineers, technologists, and executives. Founded in 2015, its mission is to help Black professionals advance into leadership roles, end industry isolation, and enact positive changes in the tech sector.
“**Bridging Innovation & Opportunity™** brings together entrepreneurs, technology leaders, investors, corporate executives, policymakers, educators, and community stakeholders for an engaging TechChicago Week executive fireside chat and networking reception. Together, we’ll explore how artificial intelligence, quantum computing, entrepreneurship, and inclusive economic development can expand opportunities for Black-owned businesses, strengthen workforce pipelines, increase access to capital, and ensure underserved communities play a leading role in Chicago’s innovation economy.
The evening will feature thought-provoking discussion, meaningful networking, and collaborative conversations focused on building partnerships that drive technology, innovation, and sustainable economic growth across Illinois. Attendees will also learn about the vision for the Garfield Park Tech & Design Center and opportunities to help shape the future of inclusive innovation on Chicago’s West Side.
“
“From Me to We”: Women Founders & Operators Community Coffee & Kickoff
The Dev Difference is hosting an intentional gathering to kick off TechChicago Week, focused on women building, running, and investing in companies. Community-style, not panels or presentations. Just come, grab a coffee, and connect. There’s always an opportunity to meet a new partner, coworker, investor or client shaping Chicago’s tech and consumer scene.
We call it From Me to We because community is where growth takes off.
The first 25 people get their first coffee, matcha, or tea on us.
Note: This event isn’t exclusive to women-identifying individuals — supporters are warmly welcome.
Thanks to our partners of Chicago-based, women-owned companies:
AllRise Legal Counsel — business lawyers for entrepreneurs, from seed to exit
Known — women’s health and cycle-tracking technology
Mooj Foods — Reimagining traditional South Asian staples with high-protein paneer
About The Dev Difference: A hiring intelligence platform that runs curated, multi-layered first-round interviews with AI, so growing teams cut through applicant volume and focus on their strongest candidates.
This isn’t your average Tech Week panel. Join VisualFizz at one of Pilsen’s most stunning, hidden-gem warehouse bars for an evening of high-caliber networking, forward-thinking strategy, and some of the finest cocktails the city has to offer.
We’re bringing together top minds in tech and marketing to discuss The Next Horizon: what’s coming, what matters, and how leaders are adapting. If you only hit one event this Tech Week, make it this one. You won’t want to miss it.
Event Highlights
- The Venue: Hosted in a breathtaking, industrial-chic warehouse space in the heart of Pilsen.
- The Drinks: Sip on curated, world-class cocktails crafted by some of the city’s best bartenders.
- The Panel: A curated conversation with industry trailblazers on the collision of tech, marketing, and leadership.
- The Crowd: No awkward icebreakers. Just genuine connections with the city’s brightest tech and marketing minds.
Sponsors:
– Simplistic Views: Video & Content Partner
– Host Cocktails: Space Partner
Your Hosts:
VisualFizz: Born and bred in Chicago, VisualFizz is led by a veteran team with nearly all team members boasting 10-20 years of deep industry expertise. They specialize in driving growth for mid-market and enterprise B2B companies through highly sophisticated, scalable digital marketing strategies. By blending seasoned business acumen with cutting-edge execution, they act as a trusted growth partner for complex organizations looking to dominate their industries.
Also, VisualFizz is about to celebrate their 10-year Anniversary!
“Most fundraising advice is built for founders already inside the VC bubble. This night is for everyone else.
Join us during Tech Chicago Week for a candid conversation about how capital really moves, how to find it where most founders don’t look, and how to raise on your own terms instead of someone else’s script.
On the panel:
Allison Byers, founder of Scroobious, the capital access platform for founders and investors, who raised millions for her own startups and co-authored California’s first law on VC funding transparency.
Tim Huelskamp, who bootstrapped 1440 Media to $100M and co-founded Fifth Star Funds to give first-time founders the friends-and-family round they never had
Rebecca Sholiton Kahnweiler, managing partner at LongJump, an early-stage Chicago VC, plus a Kellogg faculty member and a former founder herself
What you’ll leave with:
How capital actually moves: the timing, trust, and unwritten rules
Practical ways to think like an investor so your pitch lands
Capital sources beyond the loudest names in the room
Honest tactics for navigating bias without shrinking
A room full of Chicago founders and investors worth knowing
The night will include a panel discussion, Q&A, food/drink, and the opportunity to build real, authentic relationships with founders and investors.”
Grassroots Tech Meetup is a community-led gathering designed to bring Chicago’s startup and tech ecosystem together in a low-pressure, high-trust environment. The event creates space for founders, builders, operators, investors, and technologists to meet, exchange ideas, find support, and build real relationships across the local ecosystem.
We’re bringing together Chicago founders and marketing leaders for a private preview of RichieBot: Memory and Machine, an experimental documentary and immersive art project exploring one question at the center of AI today:
As AI scales what we can create, how do we preserve what makes us human?
This project began with training AI on tens of thousands of pages of writing, business philosophy, sales training, voice recordings, and video from J. Richard Dema, a marketer, entrepreneur, and the late father of Department of Growth founder, Brian Dema.
Through film, psychology, and art, the RichieBot team is exploring how a person’s ideas and creative legacy can be explored in a new way.
As we go, we are scientifically testing our work to see how close the bot has come to the man (in terms of psychological profile, personality and memory), and capturing peoples’ reactions to it to understand how remembering someone in this way makes us feel. What happens when AI moves beyond efficiency and begins shaping memory, creativity, storytelling, and human connection?
This will be part gallery opening, part film shoot, and part conversation, designed to feel a little unexpected and very much of this moment.
The event will include:
– An interactive hologram of RichieBot that you can experience for yourself
– Participation in the ongoing documentary project as we film reactions to RichieBot
– An immersive art experience with local artists creating work built from the archives
- Conversation with the RichieBot team, as well as other Chicago tech and marketing leaders
- Drinks served by a real human
Grassroots Tech Week Pitch Competition is a community-led startup pitch event designed to spotlight early-stage founders during Chicago Tech Week. The event will bring together founders, operators, investors, and ecosystem partners for a structured pitch format focused on visibility, feedback, and meaningful connections.
