Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
Oregon state economist Josh Lehner is more optimistic about the next few years for the region. He spoke this week at Portland State University’s annual Harold G. Vatter Memorial Lecture about the future of the region’s economy. Here are four takeaways from his economic forecast.
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Startups are all about trying things. Sometimes those things work. Sometimes they don’t. And it’s no different with community. Sometimes, no matter how obvious and needed something appears to be, the community reacts otherwise. So you try. You observe. And you refine based on those observations. And that’s what former marquee startup community event Demolicious is experiencing with its planned reboot, this week. So it has been canceled.
Demolicious organizer Josh Carter shared the decision to cancel this week’s event on LinkedIn:
There is no future date scheduled for the event.
For more information, visit Demolicious.
Panic’s bizarre gaming handheld was announced years ago, something that seemed whimsical and almost like a joke. It has the look of a product you’d see on an episode of Portlandia: a small, twee device in Pikachu yellow, with a Game & Watch-esque black-and-white screen, that plays games and sometimes uses its side crank for inexplicable reasons. Delightful and lovely and unexplained.
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It’s a well-known fact that Oregon State University punches above its weight when it comes to intellectual property and patents. That being said, translating academic research and development into startups can often be a challenging transition. But when it works, it works. Like it has for Agility Robotics which just raised $150 million.
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I’ve heard a lot of people talk about work-life balance, and I think the sentiment is well intentioned, but it overlooks a key opportunity. Running a company is hard as hell. Even in good times, it can be a grind. It’s definitely critical to carve out personal time, but you should also think about ways to bring more of your life into your work. I like to think of it as work-life integration.
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Playdate is a new gaming console from the beloved Mac development studio Panic. It’s small, has a metal crank, and is unlike any console we’ve played to date — and we love it.
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Rick Turoczy writes about what makes the Portland Incubator Experiment work — and what makes it worthwhile.
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Venture capital investors closed fewer deals in the Portland metro area in the first quarter of 2022 compared with last year. However, activity wasn’t far off from the number closed in the first quarter of 2020 and was well above the number closed in the first quarter of 2019.
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I’m always saying that we have a super interesting fintech cluster here in town. Thanks, in part, to the diaspora from early challenger banks like Simple. And a recent hire — by a company helmed by one of the cofounders of Simple — lends credence to that assertion. You see, Chris Chen, formerly CTO of Wyre, has joined Sila as CTO.
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Sometimes, big news happens. Which means a bunch of people write about it. And that means a lot of links. So I’ve captured those links for you in a roundup. The topic? The planned acquisition of Portland’s Puppet.
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