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“Maybe it would interesting to throw a little networking event to kickoff the year,” I thought. “We could probably get a few folks to show up.” Welp. We’ve officially hit capacity for the 2025 Kickoff event for the Portland startup community on January 14, 2025. This means two things…

While they’ve kept a relatively low profile in the Portland startup community, Lytics has continued to make waves in the Consumer Data Platform category — a category they basically defined. Today, those waves have a new owner. Lytics has been acquired by Contentstack.

Sometimes, Portland has challenges importing other event formats for our community. But apparently, we don’t have that same issue with exporting them. founder.coffee — which began as Coffee w/ Co-Founders — had expanded to Bend in 2024. Now, it’s jumping the pond. With founder.coffee Barcelona.

I’m trying to hold back. I swear. But man oh man. 2025 is starting off in the best ways. Amazing interest in the community kickoff event. Pitch Black expanding to feature food. And now, Latino Founders is building out their team. It’s a good January by any measure. Even if we stopped today. But let’s not. Let’s meet Zimri Rodriguez, the new Accelerator Manager for Latino Founders.

Feeling a little down because the next big Pitch Black competition isn’t until later in the year, this time around…? Well, turn that frown upside down. Because if you act quickly, you can be part of a new — ahem — flavor of Pitch Black: Pitch Black Food, a cooking competition happening in February.

I’ll be honest. I wasn’t sure that this would even work. But I thought we should try it anyway. So I pinged a few collaborators in the community and asked if they would be up for participating in the experiment. And thankfully, they were. Because Portland. But I didn’t really expect the RSVP list to balloon to 350 folks — and continue growing. But I’m really happy that it did. And I’m really looking forward to getting everyone together.

Given that a good chunk of the venture capital in our community comes from our neighbors to the north, I always like to keep tabs on what the VCs in Seattle are thinking. And obviously — if Portland founders are going to be chatting them up for checks — those founders should be paying attention, too. So what do Seattle VCs think about 2025…? GeekWire asked some of them.

Okay. So it’s technically the second week of the new year. But I bet it’s probably one of your first opportunities to engage with the startup community in 2025. It’s Startup Conversations in the Couve and the first conversation will take place January 8, 2025, with Mat Ellis.