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Learning about Portland through a visitor’s experiences

There’s a running joke among some of the startup community that the best opportunity to get to spend quality time with folks from Portland is to wind up together in another town for an event or some such. Now, I’m happily realizing that sometimes the best way to learn something new about our community is to have someone from outside of town tell you about it. This was recently the case with Anika Horn. And something similar just happened with Anthony Ware, who spent a couple of weeks in Portland, recently.

I want to share a look into my first experience in Portland aka PDX from November 15-27, 2019. These two weeks were the result of over a year of meeting and getting to know and trust people on Twitter. Instead of sharing while in the moment, I wanted to be as present and have time to let all the feeling roll through me.

That’s why I’m sharing my story in this post, and why I want to use my platform to celebrate the people and businesses that made this one of the most welcoming experiences that I’ve ever had in any city in the world 🙂

To get all of the details, read “There’s a first time for everything.”

NOTE: This is a none too subtle nod to folks who generously write about their experiences online. Writers, bloggers, Medium posters… whatever format they use. It was reading blogs and emails like these — longer form pieces of prose — that inspired me to start Silicon Florist, years ago. And I would love to see more folks return to sharing their perspectives in a format longer than a tweetstorm, again.

[Full disclosure: PIE is featured in Anthony’s post. I am the cofounder and general manager of PIE.]