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Remember how I said that one of the issues with creating a self-sustaining ecosystem in Portland was the irregularity of liquidity events? Well, I don’t want to get my hopes up, but… we just started the third month in a row with a liquidity event. This time, it’s Janrain getting acquired by Akamai.
If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you’ve no doubt heard me bemoan — or maybe even wax poetic — about the fact that it’s very rare for Portland or the region to have a a succession of exits or liquidity events. They generally happen as one offs. Or blips. But with recent activity for Cozy and Radar followed quickly by news of Mirador and Dakine, I’ll be darned if I’m not getting a wee bit optimistic about breaking that curse.
Startup exits—or “liquidity events” as they call them in the biz—are great. And when the exits are multiples of the amount of capital a company has raised, they’re great for both the founders and the investment community. But sometimes the impact of those exits and their impact on the Portland startup community can be a little more nuanced. So I thought I’d share some thoughts on why the recent Cozy and Radar exits are important to our community.
One of the things about which I tend to carp isn’t a lack of capital in the Portland startup scene. It’s an issue of maturity of the Portland startup scene. Because we simply haven’t had a bunch of serial entrepreneurs with successful exits plowing money back into the next generation of startups. Read More