If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “Why is it so hard to connect with people in the Portland startup community…? Am I missing a regular event or something.” Unfortunately, no. The answer isn’t as easy as that. But it does stem from the sort of secret hack that people tend to meet one another one-on-one for conversations. Rather than leaning on traditional “networking” events.
So what’s one to do? How do you find the people to connect with, one-on-one?
Honestly, we’ve been trying to answer that for a bit. Twitter used to work pretty well. And then Raven Zachary started “Portland on Fire,” which morphed into “Hello, Portland…” But still, it was challenging. So we stood up the Portland Startups Slack. And that seemed to help a little more. But there’s still an overwhelmingly large silent majority of folks who lurk on that instance.
So it seemed like a good opportunity to start something new.
And more importantly, it seemed like it was time for something bigger than just Portland. Because there are amazing startup people all over the state of Oregon. And it needed to be something that could be beneficial at scale. Rather than a slow drip of content. And it needed to be sortable. And searchable.
So here’s the rough draft of that attempt.
It’s a start. But there are still hundreds — if not thousands — of incredible folks who work in, on, and around the Oregon startup community. Maybe you’re a founder. Maybe you’re an investor. Maybe you’re a service provider who works with startups. Maybe you just want to chat with startup types as a mentor. Regardless of your motivation, you should consider adding your amazing profile to this collection of Oregon startup folks.
Just fill out the required fields — the most important being a link where you can be contacted, like LinkedIn — and hit submit. Your poignant pixels will then be gently placed in a queue for review. Once everything has been verified and checked, we’ll release it into the wild for the whole world to see.
Have changes? Just submit another version and we’ll deactivate the old version in favor of the new one. Need help? There are any number of LLMs standing by, waiting to help craft an incredible bio for you.
Whatever the case, here’s hoping you take a few minutes to share your awesomeness with the Oregon startup community. We’re all looking forward to learning more about you.
And for those of you watching at home, yes. This is the top secret thingamajig I revealed during the show, last week.
For more information or to submit your profile, visit Oregon startup folks.
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