Rick Turoczy
This week, Lewis & Clark holds their Winterim session for students and I get the sweet hat out of it. Rakaiyah Adams speaks at the first Portland Business Journal power breakfast of the year, an iPhone falls out of a plane and lives the tell about it, and a whole bunch of events and a few other things.
Let’s get into it.
Big story this week is the weather. Portland always freaks out about having bad winter weather, bad summer weather, bad weather… Portland has weather issues, not not the weather per se, just that people have issues.
Now, back to the News.
This week, you see I’m wearing a little bit of a different hat, I got a toque for beanie or whatever you want to call it. Because I had the opportunity to go up to Lewis & Clark for their Winterim program. If you haven’t heard of one term, it’s basically a similar format to Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend, obviously, is where you build a startup in a weekend protective for our sprint winter home is that same kind of thing. But for Lewis & Clark, college students to take a week to go through that. So they go through everything from team formation, to ideation to design thinking to building a pitch. And then at the end, they get to pitch to judges and the judges select a winner and the students get a great experience and they get firsthand entrepreneurial experience, they get to feel what it’s like to start a startup, I got to go early in the week, which means I got my speaker gift early in the week, which is really nice beanie from our friends at Rostec. Full disclosure there are Built and PIE accelerator alum. But you know, all in all, just a really good experience really great ideas. It’s a far cry from the days of “we should build a 24 hour coffee shop” or “we should build a cheaper bookstore.” These folks had some really interesting and thoughtful ideas, specifically around community and connection. Which is completely unsurprising, given the environment in which these folks have grown up amidst the pandemic. And who knows, I might write something up on it for next week.
If you’d like to hear more of this or stay in the loop on this game, they just subscribe, then I’ll just send this to you or YouTube will send it to you or your favorite podcast thingamajig we’ll send it to you so subscribe, and then I can keep you in the loop.
Portland Business Journal had their first power breakfast of the year. And boy did they pick someone with power to be the guest Rukaiyah Adams was the guest… super informative, super inspiring. Like Rukaiyah. She’s just great. We are so lucky to have her on port on Portland side. And working for Portland and writing love letters to Portland. I’ll link up her love letter Portland from TEDx. But she’s continuing that love letter and continuing that love of Portland and her belief in what we as a community have the potential to accomplish. It was just a great, I was at a great table. Lots of amazing folks got to see a lot of folks who were in attendance was sold out crowd Rukaiyah just knocked it out of the park like she always does. If you haven’t had the chance to see or speak I highly encourage you to take the opportunity to do so genuinely an amazing human and Portland is lucky to have her. Congrats to the Portland Business Journal way to kick off the year
I started the week with the college students ended the week with Rukaiyah Adams I was lucky this week and very privileged this week to get the chance to hang out with a bunch of awesome folks. I hope you did too. I hope your new year is starting off in a similar vein where you’re getting to hang out with a bunch of awesome folks and getting inspired to do amazing things this year.
What else is going on? Oh, I’ve got some really interesting stuff potentially launching next week and it involves AI…
I don’t know if you heard about this one. It made national news and made international news. There’s an Alaska Airlines flight in Portland that took off and then part of the plane took off and so they had to land the plane because there was this big hole in the side there they’re referring to it as a door plug. Luckily, no one was hurt and they landed safely and everybody got out with that Sydney significant injury so that was all good. Obviously frightening for all the passengers and I wish them the best. Sorry that they had to get through that. But one of those you know random news items that had a kind of like, tech angle to it and iPhone flew out of the plane, the planes up in the air, part of the fuselage comes off, like start sucking stuff out an iPhone, made the leap out of the plane and wound up surviving the fall. Then somebody found it out in the Portland suburbs and tweeted about it. And it goes what the kids like to call “viral” — winds up getting 19 million views and 85,000 likes but yeah, just one of those things where it’s like it’s an awful incident. This just adds kind of a moment of levity to it. So I wanted to share it and it’s an iPhone and tech.
I promised you this year, I want to keep you up to date on all the events that are happening in Portland so that you can get involved with the community, be that virtually or in person. And next week is a very big week in terms of events. So I’m just gonna kind of rattle off the list of events happening next week, Tuesday Pitch Please the PDX wit virtual happy hour to AI and data communities open mic night and PDX si p p on Wednesday bootstrap founders connect there’s a virtual Lunch and Learn for bootstrap founders den malicious. Its back. And also on Wednesday, the climate curious crew if you’re interested in climate tech or climate solutions, that climate curious, is your group climate curious, we’ll be helping to judge the Portland State clean tech challenge on Thursday, Portland, podcasters are getting together, there’s hacking a SAS Thursday is also social beer gathering from the folks from the Portland startup slack, not on Portland startup slack you don’t know about it, I will link up that video here. So that you can join the slack instance, and meet some of the folks before you meet them for social beer or maybe just show up to social beer. And you can decide whether you want to be on the slack or not 6000 some odd folks who’ve joined that slack. So it might be beneficial for you to join it as well, probably not 6000 people at social beer, but I don’t know. Don’t count them out. Maybe 6000 people there, you’ll just have to show up and find out. And then Saturday is the inaugural Silicon Forest Tech Summit, this can be a great opportunity to get together with more of the hard tech, traditional Silicon Forest types.
So you may say to yourself, you’re like, hey, self, how does Rick manage to keep track of all of these events? What the heck was he just reading off of to tell me about all these events? Well, I’m glad you asked. The answer is Calagator. Calagator is the aggregated tech calendar for Portland. Doesn’t matter if people are posting stuff to meet up or Eventbrite or splash for their own personal sites. Calagator is the aggregated list of all those things happening in the tech community. And if you’re interested in learning more about Calagator I put together a little how to to help you feel more at home with alligator. But fact of the matter is people are starting to use it quite actively again. And it’s returning to its you know, former prominence as the premier resource for figuring out what’s going on in the Portland tech and startup community on any given day in a given week. So I encourage you to check out Calagator and please check out that video. If you need some help posting things or you’re curious about Calagator that can be a great primer on helping you get up to speed.
I hope your power stays on. I hope stay warm. I hope the weather doesn’t cause too much of an issue. If if there even is weather. I can’t tell yet. I hope you have a good weekend. Hope this was informative as always happy new year. Again. I’ll keep saying Happy new year for the next three or four months. Hang in there. And until we get the chance to chat again. Please keep up the good work.
