Beyond the Bay: In Portland, Size Matters
No idea why this popped up in my feed, this morning. It’s a few years old. But it’s a much-needed refresher course on what we’ve got here in Portland. And what we have the opportunity to rekindle and exceed post-pandemic.
How To Tell When To Give Up On Your Startup
It’s possible to be default dead and yet still to have a good business. That’s because companies often take a while to figure out who to sell their product to and how to reach potential customers cost-effectively, and move them through the sales cycle efficiently to the point where they start paying money.
March 2022 Hacker News Hiring Trends
Back up at the top of the charts, the remote hiring trend appears to have peaked, dropping back from an all time high of ~77% of postings to this month with ~74% of postings. Not a big drop, and that’s already amazingly high, but the trend is not climbing higher.
Web3 is centralized
VCs are built to build monopolies, and monopolies want central control. Something like Tor or Folding@Home is be somewhat decentralized, since it’s a nonprofit in control and neither Tor or Stanford are for-profit businesses. But most Web3 firms are for-profit businesses, and so are the VC firms backing them. They would rather have one big monopoly than a truly competitive market, and just change the monopoly operator every generation.
SaaS acquisition multiples
Alongside multiples of publicly traded SaaS companies, public SaaS acquisitions are some of the most relevant you can look at for deriving SaaS revenue multiples. These transactions are all cash, the financials are public and audited, and these are all control transactions so the data is about as pure as it gets.
Steward: Where the Buffalo Roam
Across the nation and throughout the industry, Liz highlights, “these women are really grabbing the bull by the horns and showcasing some wonderful meat and bison operations — showcasing what can be done when you work within that community, the grass and the soil, and give more than you take. It’s been a beautiful story that has been unfolding, that I’ve been watching for years and years now.”
Black Ambition Prize 2022
Black Ambition seeks to fund bold ideas and reduce barriers to capital for Black and Latinx entrepreneurs. The Black Ambition Prize is a tiered opportunity for early-stage Black and Latinx founders to compete for more than $2,000,000 and learn with a network of talented founders and cross-sector business leaders.
An Oregon investment fund hits new heights
It’s also part of an overall growth and maturity story for the Portland startup ecosystem in which several local venture firms, who bet on the region in the mid-aughts, are raising larger and larger funds.
Icon: The Easiest Way to Offer a Retirement Plan
“If you’re reading this article it’s probably because you’ve tried to offer a 401k retirement plan and found it to be complicated, confusing, and expensive. With a payroll IRA, small and medium businesses now have an easy way to offer their employees a retirement savings plan without the cost, risk, and complexity of a 401k. No matter what your setup, whether you have all W2 employees, all 1099 workers or a mixture of both, a payroll IRA is the easiest way to offer the people on your payroll a retirement savings plan.
