Portland Oregon Startup and Tech News
Portland has always been a good town for user groups, where folks gather on a monthly basis to discuss languages and frameworks that are of interest to them. But for all of those amazing gatherings, it’s always nice to see larger user groups taking place in town. Like Sensu Summit.
It’s always bittersweet. Given the way that we Portlanders—in our garage band mentality—think about things. We love the homegrown stuff. And we want it to succeed. But sometimes it’s hard to let go. Still, seeing PitchBlack rocket into the stratosphere can’t help but make me happy.
I know it’s more difficult than it should be. I know you have to hustle harder than most. But you can do it. And I believe in you. So this weekend, I stumbled into a bit of a pep talk. So I wanted to capture it for you here.
Back 11 years ago, when I started this blog, one of the things I appreciated most about the Portland startup community was its transparency. Everybody was blogging. About what they thought. About what they were building. About everything.
It’s always a joy to see new startup accelerator programs starting in the Portland startup community. One might say that, with this one, my tail is wagging. My tail… Ahem. *tap tap tap* Is this thing on?
Back a dozen years or so, before I started this blog, I happened upon COLOURlovers, a Portland founded startup that was unlike anything I had seen to date. It wasn’t a business to business site. It wasn’t software. It was consumer focused. And social.
Digital healthcare has long been one of Portland’s strongest areas of startup success and support. But like so many awesome Portland things, it’s also a tightly knit community for which it can be difficult to figure out where to start. That’s why OTRADI Oregon Bioscience Incubator started a regular happy hour. So that making those connections could be easier.
It’s the end of the week. A time to reflect. And prepare for the week ahead. And for many startups, it’s a time to realize, yet again, that startups are just hard. And difficult. And messy. You don’t always have the answers. You don’t know where to find them. And you’re often lost. But there are folks who want to help. With things like Startup Therapy Office Hours.
Startup folks, am I right? They’re always thinking of creative solutions to problems. And in Portland, unlike some of our differently motivated neighbors to the south, they’re often thinking about solutions that make life better for everyone in our community. Like Business for a Better Portland. An ad hoc chamber of commerce that sprung out of a desire to inform a collaborative—rather than contentious—model of public-private partnership.
