Month: October 2024

I’m calling this one. Crescendo is a Portland startup. Whether they like it or not. You see, the founder and CEO of Crescendo is here in Portland. Malia Spencer at the Portland Business Journal is covering them. And the way we were defining “Portland startups” in the before times seems ripe for disruption. So I’m calling Crescendo a Portland startup. Which means a Portland startup just raised $50 million in Series C.

Bureaucracy. Sometimes necessary. Often frustrating. Always difficult to navigate. Take real estate zoning and codes and whatnot. Not the morass of jargon and confusion that most mere mortals ever willingly enter. Let alone understand. So why not get the robots to help…? That’s what Fordje is — um — for-dje. And they’ve just launched a product called Code Clarifier to help, well, clarify the codes. Clearly.

I’ve mentioned the fact that Richard MacManus, the founder of ReadWriteWeb, is currently in the midst of publishing a a serialized memoir of his experience starting and leading one of the most popular tech blogs on the web during the Web 2.0 and early SaaS days. Well, the Portland of 2010 takes a center stage in this latest edition. Given the number of RWW staff that called Portland home at the time.

You heard about this thing called “8 minute abs”? Oh wait. That’s not it. I mean… You know what’s faster than a three minute pitch…? A two minute pitch. It’s a whole minute less, so you better have your story dialed. (Not to mention that, as an event organizer, you get to cram in more startup pitches in the same amount of time.) But whatever the case, if you feel you’re up to that challenge, then Oregon Venture Fund would like to hear from you.

Not much longer now. Bend Venture Conference 2024 takes place October 17-18, 2024. But it’s not much of a conference without startups taking the stage. And some of the most interesting opportunities are those startups that are at the earliest stages.Like the BVC Early Stage Finalists.