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Month: July 2021

Guest post: The Portland startup community is failing. Good.

Editor: Darius Monsef is a serial founder who has wrestled with the challenges of the Portland startup community, off and on, for nearing two decades. His first company, COLOURlovers, went through Y Combinator and merged with Creative Market before being acquired by Autodesk. He cofounded Sightbox which went on to be acquired by Johnson & Johnson. His latest pursuit is Brave Care, another Y Combinator alum that is rethinking the delivery of pediatric care.

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Bend startup Zipcan launches to the public, trends on Product Hunt

After a successful closed beta, serial entrepreneur Fritz Brumder today officially launched the product from his latest pursuit, Zipcan, a product that — in my overly simplified take — resembles the functionality of the Intercom and chat buttons you see around the Internet but that — instead of engaging you in a pseudo conversation with a chat bot — immediately puts you into a video chat with a real human.

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Loss (of a) leader: Startup community builder Joe Maruschak is leaving Eugene and Oregon

For some folks, this may come as a shock. For many of us in similar roles, we’re like “Yep. It was only a matter of time.” Joe Maruschak, who has been instrumental in mentoring, advising, and investing in startups in the Eugene, Oregon, and Lane County region, is leaving because the role he’s been serving is not effectively supported from a financial standpoint.

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Thoughts on community and Clickety

One of my favorite things about working with early stage startups is getting the opportunity to use the earliest versions of their products — and then getting to watch those product morph and iterate over time. So when Puppet founder Luke Kanies offered me the opportunity to be an early user of Clickety — his newest startup pursuit — I jumped at the chance. Especially because Clickety had the potential to solve some very specific pain points and knowledge gaps for me.

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All together now: Chorus.ai acquired by ZoomInfo for $575M

Former startup now publicly traded ZoomInfo across the river in Vancouver, Washington, has announced that they are acquiring Chorus.ai. The acquisition is designed to add features to ZoomInfo that help sales people be better sales people by surfacing insights and analytics that would be impossible to intuit without sitting in every single sales or customer service call.

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Portland’s Coolest Cooler among MSCHF failed hardware collectibles

It’s like Funko Pop for failed hardware. Or Garbage Pail Kids for startups. Randomly creative house MSCHF has created a set of tiny versions of famously bad hardware projects — or projects that failed famously. And coming as a shock to absolutely no one, Portland’s Coolest Cooler — at one time the breathlessly heralded “most successful Kickstarter in history” — is right there among them. Front and center.

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