Ask any startup employee about the perks of their job and, aside from flexible work options and a Ping Pong table, they might mention the lack of red tape. Some small companies are embracing flat structures to step farther away from the typically corporate chain of command that they see as a strain on creativity and productivity.

Flat structures remove the middle manager. That takes away close supervision and gives employees more freedom in creativity and decision-making.

Take Datascope Analytics, a five-year-old, nine-person data-science shop with an office in the Loop. Five employees share a title — data scientist — while the company’s four partners, including co-founders Dean Malmgren and Mike Stringer, are data scientists who carry extra labels. All nine have the same monthly salary.

“It’s hard to have a culture that promotes creativity and thinking of things differently,” Malmgren said. “It’s really important to get lots of input from equally valid sources.”

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had no board of directors. And he had no outside investors to pressure him about putting one together.

Yet in his early 30s, Robert Nathan set out to build a board — of advisers, that is — that would help him and his company respond to growth and continue growing.

And grow it has.

His company, third-party logistics provider Load Delivered Logistics, has grown more than 1,200 percent since its 2008 launch, he said, hitting $44.5 million in revenue last year. He expects to reach $90 million in sales this year, with the help of investments in automation technology.

The company’s recent growth followed a period of change that Nathan initiated to set up the company for funding and additional growth. About 18 months ago, he started making connections with people who would become his board members. He said he wanted “coaches” who would challenge him, and he brought in three advisers.

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This school year, nearly 500 high school students in northwest suburban Chicago will learn to design apps for the devices many of them carry in their pockets.

The Mobile Makers for High Schools program launched this week at Barrington High School and at six high schools in Arlington Heights-based Township School District 214. Through the year-long course, students will learn to build apps for Apple devices in the company’s new programming language, Swift. The course calls for the teens to develop nine mobile apps, with their teachers acting as clients.

“Students get to start coding on Day One,” said Brandon Passley, Mobile Makers Academy’s founder and CEO. “They’re going to understand what it’s going to be like to work on a technology team.”

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Entrepreneurs rank hiring the best people, earning press coverage and winning funding highest among their many concerns, according to a Chicago Innovation Awards survey. The group hosted a series of panels for its Media, Capital and Talent Day on Monday at the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.

This year’s Chicago Innovation Awards judges will consider 550 nominees and will announce the winners at its annual ceremony on Oct. 30 at the Harris Theater. Monday’s participants, on the stage and off, included 2014 nominees, past winners, judges and board members.

Panelists offered insights and advice relating to three broad topics: Attracting talent, gaining attention and raising funds.

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What does a tech futurist who has created his own concept of Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop, founded a cloud collaboration company and earned a PhD from Harvard in building technology say about whether a robot is going to take your job?

Wrong question. Learn to work with the robots.

Jordan Brandt specializes in figuring out how to use cutting-edge technologies such as 3D printing on a bigger scale, often using automation. He’s a technology futurist at Autodesk, the 34-year-old San Rafael, Calif.-based company that produces design software for industries including engineering, architecture, manufacturing and construction. He joined Autodesk when it acquired his company, Horizontal Systems.

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Packback, the Chicago-based platform for renting e-textbooks on demand, on Tuesday announced a $1 million seed round from a group of more than 20 angel investors. The total includes a $250,000 investment the company earned from “Shark Tank” star and investor Mark Cuban when co-founders Mike Shannon and Kasey Gandham appeared on the show in March.

Shannon and Gandham founded Packback while students at Illinois State University in 2012. Early on, they reached out to Chicago entrepreneurs and investors they admired for advice — a strategy that finally paid off.

“It was really a relationship-developing process,” Shannon said. “Our advisors evolved into investors.”

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Chicago-based Hireology, whose software platform uses data to help with hiring decisions, on Tuesday announced a $10 million Series B investment from Boston-based venture capital firm Bain Capital Ventures.

With some 1,500 customers on five continents, CEO and co-founder Adam Robinson said he has his eye on expanding into new market categories and investing in product development.

“Our solution is all about helping that manager out in the field who has limited or no HR support to do it right themselves,” Robinson said. “By doing that location by location, the corporation or the brand benefits immensely from the improved results across the system.”

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Your peer group could be more valuable than you realize. So valuable that you may want to stock your kitchen with it.

Entrepreneurs often revere mentors for the guidance and connections they provide. But bouncing ideas off of individuals in similar career phases can be equally valuable. Both types of advisers often come together in “kitchen cabinets,” or informal trusted groups that people turn to for guidance and support.

As the name suggests, kitchen cabinets often are casually organized yet home to ingredients for a strong network.

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