In this episode of Ventures by the Lake, we sit down with Manuela Zoninsein, founder and CEO of Kadeya, to talk about reinventing bottled water, dialing in on deep customer needs, and scaling hardware in overlooked markets.

Manuela shares how Kadeya evolved from a homegrown experiment to a full-fledged closed-loop beverage system, complete with smart, self-sanitizing vending machines and reusable bottles. What started as a pilot in a tech office kitchen has since found product-market fit on construction sites, military bases, and industrial campuses - where hydration, waste, and logistics collide.

We discuss how her background shaped her entrepreneurial lens, and why she believes industrial infrastructure is the most overlooked climate opportunity today. Manuela also talks through early pivots, the challenges of being a hardware founder, and how she built a team culture rooted in transparency, curiosity, and speed.

Check out Kadeya here!

In this episode of Ventures by the Lake, we sit down with Tom Sosnoff - founder of Thinkorswim, Tastytrade, and Tastylive - to talk about grit, trading floors, and building billion-dollar companies. A pioneer in options trading and fintech, Tom shares how he landed in Chicago with $5,000 and ended up creating some of the most influential platforms in retail trading.

We sit down with Kevin Willer - the founding CEO of 1871, founding partner at Chicago Ventures, and a driving force in building Chicago’s startup community. Kevin shares stories from launching Google’s Chicago office in the early 2000s, to helping create 1871 as a hub for entrepreneurs, to investing in the city’s next generation of founders. We explore the evolution of Chicago’s tech scene, lessons from two decades of growth, and why the next wave of big bets - from hard tech to quantum computing - could define the city’s future.