Portland startups, open source, and tech news, jobs, and events #pdx
One of my favorite things about the Portland startup community is a willingness to help one another. Rarely do I have a conversation with anyone in town that fails to include “Is there anything I can be doing to help you…?” It’s just the ethos around here.
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We’ve got some great resources for the Portland startup community. There’s the Portland startups Slack, which is a great spot for quick questions or connecting with other folks. There’s the Portland startups Switchboard, a way of supporting one another in the community with Asks and Offers. But it feels like conversations about content, companies, and other startuppy stuff is still fragmented and distributed on a variety of social networks and platforms.
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Switchboard, a Portland company founded by Mara Zepeda — and one that powers the Portland Startups Switchboard — has announced the completion of a successful merger with a similarly minded business out of Chicago, Hearken. The combined entity will retain the Hearken name.
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Some of us have seen this before. And yet for many of you, this is a whole new experience. An incident occurs. The markets tumble. The economy starts to tank. The bubble pops. And then come the layoffs. It’s sudden, shocking, and paralyzing for folks affected. And it can be hard to figure out where to turn. So given the already escalating number of jobs eliminated in Portland, I thought it would be wise to provide a few resources that may be helpful in this time of need.
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Admittedly, I get a little cranky about the posts that appear on the Portland Startups Switchboard from time to time. But there are also a bunch of good posts that pop up there all of the time—posts that might not get the attention they deserve. So rather than focusing on the negative, I thought it might be nice to accentuate the positive.
It’s that time of year. Time to start sprucing things up. And getting ready for the summer months. So it makes perfect sense that the Portland Startups Switchboard would benefit from the launch of a new user interface.
Never underestimate the value of peer support and connections. It’s one of the things that makes services like Switchboard so compelling. And now they’re using that same power of connectivity to help innovative folks get more connected to their peers—in the real world. Introducing the Switchboard Higher Education Innovation Fellowship, a structured year-long program with both real world and virtual collaboration.
I know that this may come as a surprise, but I get a bunch of questions from folks. Like “You’ve been writing about the Portland startup scene for almost a decade. How is it that you’ve never learned how to use the English language?” And “What do you actually do?” And “A beard? Really?” But one question I get more often than any other is “How do I get involved in the Portland startup scene?” Read More
I didn’t really know what to expect. I mean, I knew that Portland boasted an extremely tightly knit and collaborative community. I knew that I was—more often than not—creating bottlenecks and logjams than I was solving by inefficiently connecting people. And I knew that I had an amazing local startup that had a platform for solving these very issues. What the hell, I thought. It just might work. Read More
Early stage startups are always looking for that first customer win. Someone who is willing to take a chance on their technology and vision. To help them prove the value and worth of their offering. Governments are often encumbered with archaic systems or new problems that they know technology can solve. But they don’t know where to turn for help. Read More