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Category: Interviews

Portland and Social Entrepreneurship: A conversation with Darius Monsef of COLOURlovers and All Hands

[Editor: Dale Davidson of TrekDek shares another guest post with us.]

I recently sat down with Darius Monsef IV aka Bubs, the founder of COLOURlovers. Though much of the tech world is focused on the recent $1 million dollar funding they recently received, I thought I would try to get his perspective on the world of social entrepreneurship and Portland’s role in it. Considering that Darius is a co-founder and an active member of the non-profit All Hands, a disaster relief group, he is extremely knowledgeable about the subject. Read More

GenJuice: Official Gen Y entrepreneur tour swings by Portland June 23

A conference that’s based on both entrepreneurial innovation and the age of those innovators. Introducing the official US Gen Y innovation tour, GenJuice.

There are any number of events and conferences and camps in Portland that work to get likeminded people in the same room. Generally, these revolve around a certain topic. Like a coding language or a blogging platform or cyborgs.

But now, we’re getting the chance to experience something a little different. It’s a conference that’s based on both entrepreneurial innovation and the age of those innovators. Introducing the official US Gen Y innovation tour, GenJuice.

The tour has a crazy schedule. We travel to 13 cities over 40 days. We will be in Portland for two days. On the first day, we travel around the city interviewing young entrepreneurs who we admire. We stream all of these video interviews and videos of us exploring the city on the GenJuice website.

On the last day in each city, we hold our “unconference” event and tweetup for approximately 60-75 attendees all between 17 – 29. At these unconferences, attendees will get a fun introductory performance from local artists, hear a keynote from a seasoned local entrepreneur and lead/contribute to attendee-led discussions.

What’s more, they’re looking for young entrepreneurs to interview. So if you’re one of those type of folks—which I think you may be—why not comment below and we’ll get you connected with the GenJuice folks?

Interested in attending a meetup with the GenJuic folks on June 23? You can sign up to meet with GenJuice on Wednesday afternoon. Need more info? Like GenJuice on Facebook or follow GenJuice on Twitter.

Gary Vaynerchuk chats with Doug Coleman during his Portland stop

Earlier this week, Gary Vaynerchuk—of Wine Library TV fame—was in town promoting his new book, Crush It. During his visit, he wound up spending about a couple of hours taking questions and signing books for around 150 folks at Powell’s Downtown.

Earlier this week, Gary Vaynerchuk—of Wine Library TV fame—was in town promoting his new book, Crush It. During his visit, he wound up spending about a couple of hours taking questions and signing books for around 150 folks at Powell’s Downtown.

But that’s not all. Doug Coleman managed to snag some time with Gary to talk about his background, his passions, and his advice for folks looking to Crush It. Doug was nice enough to share the video with me, so I’m sharing it with you. Read More

Portland Incubator Experiment continues to take form

Back when I first mentioned the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE) a collaborative project between Wieden + Kennedy and some folks in the Portland startup scene details were admittedly nebulous.

[HTML4]Back when I first mentioned the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE)—a collaborative project between Wieden + Kennedy and some folks in the Portland startup scene—details were, admittedly, nebulous. And understandably, to some, it seemed as if the folks at PIE were being intentionally vague. So I promised to keep providing more details as time went on.

Well, now some more folks involved in the experiment—like Renny Gleeson of W+K, Scott Kveton, and Jason Glaspey, all of whom are helping head up PIE—have provided some of their thoughts on what PIE is trying to accomplish. Read More