1871 Says: Our partners at Sage are gearing up for their annual Sage Summit, the largest gathering of small and medium-sized business in the world. The 1871 community can attend Sage Summit at a special rate using code 1871PROMO here. Ahead of the event, Sage has contributed a guest blog to the 1871 site, highlighting keynote speaker Sir Richard Branson's entrepreneurial journey. Learn more below:

Both inside and outside of Turkey’s borders, people are noticing the opportunities that a fast-growing, developing market can churn out. At an international level, 500 Startups announced the creation of 500 Istanbul, a $15M micro-fund that will invest in more than 100 Turkish startups in the next several years. 500 Startups already invested in eight companies founded by Turkish entrepreneurs: Udemy, Socialwire, Parlakbirgelecek, Connected2.me, Boostable, Adphorus, Mobile Action, and Koding.

One of the ways we have recently committed to growing entrepreneurship throughout the city while fostering diversity is through our purchasing power -- specifically through the money we spend on food. We're sitting down with local entrepreneurs we've worked with to find out more about their businesses and their journeys as small business owners. Here's our interview with Gaylor Voss, Owner of Gayle's Best Ever Grilled Cheese.

There's no question that there's a power and many advantages to being the first mover in a new market, along with a like number of potential downsides that require careful navigation. I've written about both aspects of this "advantage" previously and it remains a complex area to figure out. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/first-mover-advantage-maybe-but-be-smart-about-it.html.  And I also appreciate that the conventional wisdom suggests, in almost every tech-based or tech-enabled business, that markets over time will tend to become "winner take all" or "winner take most" in which a single player dominates. See http://www.inc.com/howard-tullman/future-of-content-marketing-simplereach.html .

1871 Says: Andy Crestodina, Founder of Orbit Media, will be featured as the keynote speaker on March 22, 2016 at 1871 as a part of the Chicago AMA series, where he will be covering the content of this post and much more! Learn more about this event by checking out Applied Analytics: Insights and Actions from 12 Reports.

1871 member BallotReady helps voters make informed decisions by providing free, non-partisan background information on every candidate and referendum on a voter’s ballot. Ahead of the Illinois primary elections, we sat down with them to find out more about how they're increasing voter awareness and engagement:

1871 member Yolobe visited the White House last week for the Summer Opportunity Workshop and Champions of Change event. We sat down with Yolobe to learn more about this great opportunity.

1871 today announced the eighteen members (representing thirteen businesses) of the second class of WiSTEM, a first of its kind program designed to foster opportunities for women in technology. The new members will begin the WiSTEM curriculum next week and will join an initial network of thirteen women entrepreneurs from the first WiSTEM cohort, which completed programming earlier this year. WiSTEM is part of Google for Entrepreneurs’ #40Forward initiative, and is also supported by the Lefkofsky Family Foundation, the Motorola Mobility Foundation, Katrina Markoff, and AT&T.

It’s been an amazing two years since Anyone Can Learn To Code was founded, right here at 1871. Since then, we’ve graduated dozens of new developers over five cohorts in Chicago, and even expanded to San Francisco in late 2015. This year holds even more great things in store, which we can’t wait to announce over the coming weeks. At our two-year anniversary, we want to take a look back at what we and our developer graduates have accomplished.