Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
As a startup, you have to make best use of your time — your most limited and valuable resource. And when you’re making products that require partners to make it into the hands of your customers, you’re even more strapped for time. Like consumer products. That needs often needs shelves or marketplaces to get in front of their consumers. That’s why companies like Parsnip are super interesting.
I love seeing Koan starting to get more engaged in the Portland startup community. First, they’ve been out and about running workshops designed to help companies better understand management through Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) — in a really grassroots and Portlandy way. And now? They’ve signed on Portland startup juggernaut Vacasa as a client.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Portland was home to more hackathons than you could shake a keyboard at. Hackathons that brought disparate groups in our community together. And helped tighten bonds among members of the community. Hack hack hackity hack.
Portland is nothing if not collaborative. So it would only make sense that a bunch of the Portland startup community would band together to help welcome the newest startup support organization in to town, WeWork Labs Portland. And what better way to show that support than to gather in celebration of the launch of the project.
Truth be told, it’s always entertaining to tune in to Stephen Green’s Twitter feed. You wouldn’t expect any less from the unofficial mayor of Portland. And for the past few years, it’s also been incredibly educational and inspiring to keep track of his tweets during February. Because that’s Black History Month. Which Stephen uses as an opportunity to highlight a number of black entrepreneurs and black owned businesses in our region.
I often bemoan the fact that, dadgummit, kids just don’t blog like they used to. What with all of the social medias and stuff. That’s why it’s always nice to see another voice providing news and insights on Portland and our community. Like Bridgeliner, a local outpost of the WhereBy.Us network.
You’ve heard me talk about the growing prevalence of regional offices as a compelling and growing part of the Portland startup community. To date, many of these offices — which often rival or fully eclipse (Intel) full fledged Portland companies in size — have played the role of employers, event hosts, and sponsors for the community, as a whole. And that’s a trend that I hope to see continue.
While we’ve all been geeking out about VR for a while now, it’s not always easy to understand the practical and needed applications of that technology. Until we see them. And then we’re like “Ohhhhhhh. Yeah. That makes sense.” Like the work Portland startup The Wild did with adidas and the HTC Vive.
In case you haven’t noticed, Portland has more than its fair share of interesting regional offices — often established through acquisition. There are the obvious ones. Like AWS (via Elemental). And ebay (via Critical Path). And Akamai (via Janrain).
[Editor: Meetup groups shut down all of the time. That’s not newsworthy. What’s worth your time is reading about why the Portland 1 Million Cups Meetup is shutting down. And then decide what we can do to prevent this from happening again. The following was sent to the group by lead organizer, Dayna Reed. Reposted with permission.]