Month: April 2025

Of the startup support organizations in the Portland metro region, TiE Oregon has always had a special place in the community — as an organization that has access to both educational and mentoring resources coupled with an active group of Angels. Which makes them the perfect organization to support early stage startups of all kinds. And now, they’ve got a new president helping to guide that engagement. Meet Matt Dittrich.

Sometimes, the hardest part about being a startup founder is being honest with yourself about whether your idea has merit, could be viable, and — perhaps most importantly — is timing the market correctly. It’s difficult to have that sort of objectivity when you’re so passionate about this thing you want to see in the world. That’s why you might benefit from Nascent Startups.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times. With startups, it’s all about timing. And Portland startup Graze seems to be timing their effort exceptionally well. The company focuses on building tools that allow users to create custom feeds of Bluesky content to which other Bluesky users can subscribe. As an added feature, there’s also the option of including promotional posts and paid advertisements among the stream of updates in the feed. And now, Graze has $1 million of runway to keep building out the concept.

Anecdotally — and you know how Portland loves its anecdotal data — it really seemed like there was a bit more investment capital announced at the beginning of the year. A few big rounds. A consistent trickle of earlier stage funding. It definitely seemed more noisy on the VC front. But now, we can be sure that it, in fact, was. Because we have data to back it up. From Pitchbook as shared by the Portland Business Journal.

Continuing the fireside chat events series that featured Black founders during Black History Month and women founders during Women’s History Month, a collective of startup support organizations — Built Oregon, Latino Founders, Pitch Black, Pitch Latino, PIE, and Vanport Studio — are celebrating Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander founders and community leaders during AAPI Heritage Month in May.

I always say that, when it comes to startup ecosystems, there’s the Bay Area, and then there’s practically everywhere else. That’s part of the motivation behind running experiments in the Portland startup community: those findings have the potential to be leveraged by other startup communities around the world — in a way that lessons from Silicon Valley never can.

Back in the before times, I had the opportunity to take the stage for TEDxPortland during the “Bridges” class of speakers. I was honored and humbled. But I was also super nervous. TEDxPortland was among the top 3 TEDx events, worldwide. I realized how much this opportunity meant. And I wanted to make the most of it.

While a number of us have gravitated to Bluesky as a consumer, there’s also a ton of opportunity around building in, on, and around Bluesky as a developer. If you’re more interested in the latter, then get ready to be happy. Peat Bakke, cofounder of Graze, has put together a gathering of Bluesky/ATProto folks.