You know what Portland does really well? Not start-ups, not yet. It has fostered an amazing array of web geek user groups. Check out this list of goings on in the local tech scene, and note that the calendaring app itself was developed by a collaborative effort that spawned from a user group:
And the quality of discourse at some of these local meet-ups is astonishingly progressive and technical. It feels like Portland's start-up scene isn't the best indicator of our technical culture and potential. Our traditional start-ups stand in the long shadow of Silicon Valley, and may expend too much energy wondering when someone will swoop down and invest.
Portland will make a name for itself by doing business in a much different manner than is done in the valley. The absence of venture capital will force us to invent better models.
BTW, have you guys seen Urban Edibles? It's a collaboratively developed wiki detailing where one can find food growing in Portland's urban areas.
http://urbanedibles.org/
My roommate used it to make 3 jars of golden plum jam entirely from foraged fruit.
Portland has this almost unhealthy obsession with getting itself "On The Map".
- If we just build this convention center, that'll put us Portland The Map.
- If we can build a successful light rail system, that will put Portland On The Map.
- If we could only attract a major league baseball team, that would put Portland On The Map.
There's a Map out there somewhere, and Portland really wants to be on it. Pick any thing that any big city has, and Portland will want one too, because that will be the thing that finally pushes it over the edge to where it is respected as a "real city."
This article sounds like more of the same. There are Startup Hubs to be had, and P-town needs one. Because that'll put it on the map.
Don't get me wrong. I lived in Portland for almost 10 years, and it's a great place. But it's got like 1/10 the population of Seattle, and I think that gives it a bit of a complex. I wish it would chill out and settle into its role of a comfortable small city where you can live and work downtown.
That's all you need to be, Portland. Stop trying to grow up too fast.
Portland really is a great city, and I think it's a lot calmer than Silicon Valley. Although your local pub might not be filled with a dozen angel investors, Portland has embraced the young startup culture. With groups like OMSI, DorkbotPDX, Cubespace, and recently TechShop, it's a haven for hackers of all types. Not to mention a great music scene, delicious food trucks, and the best microbreweries in the nation.
The crucial thing it's missing is a large technical school. And that's likely the reason it will never be able to touch Silicon Valley in terms of startups.
Not true. Portland State has a decent Engineering/CS school that's growing like a weed. It's just going to take a little while for it to build a bigger rep.
I am currently in Portland and we started our company here (Mugasha) about a year ago. Cost wise, its much cheaper to live here which definitely reduces burn-rate. The community is pretty cool, lots of awesome people who are constantly throwing local tech events. Lot of designers and developers (creatives) in the area.
What is missing?
For one. Statup types. Most people I have come across in Portland don't seem to be the type that would build companies. People seem to be working on mostly side-projects. The community is very "social media" driven and there is not a lot of chatter going around on about how do you build businesses?
Second, would be. Mentorship. It has been fairly difficult for us to find people who have been there and done it. People who have built companies in the past. There are no VC's here. Very few angels here, at least angels who are focused in the web/tech space.
I think Portland is a great place to start a project. Potentially meet co-founders. Although, It's hard for me to say that I would continue to build my company here.
This years DjangoCon (conference from 8th - 10th September; sprints from 10th to 12th sep) is in Portland, OR. It's my first time travelling to USA and I'm really looking forward to this :-)
I grew up here and moved back after college in CA, so I'm a little biased. It's a great place to live. The tech scene is really inviting and impressively sophisticated as others have mentioned. The Ruby group where that calagator app was developed is superb, as is DorkbotPDX. I find it substantially cheaper and easier to get around here than LA/SF since it's not that big of a city (strict urban growth boundaries), it's reasonably dense and it's public transportation is well above average.
While it's easy to find people who are passionate about technology and building things, I don't feel it has the culture of ambition that's so prevalent in CA. Maybe it's because people are happy to be doing things that don't cost anything, like enjoying the outdoors or local music scene, and are less self conscious about what they drive.
I've actually been considering going up for a few weeks, because California's tax structure, high cost of living, and overall lack of decent public infrastructure is seriously unfavorable to small business.
Oregon has no sales tax, and as such its income and property taxes are much higher than many states. This is especially true in Multnomah County (where Portland is located), due to county income and business taxes on top of state. See, i.e.
I've lived in both San Francisco and Portland, and anecdotally I found Portland's infrastructure and services to be far inferior to those in San Francisco: worse roads (climate doesn't help), more homeless, more difficult city bureaucracy, etc. This is of course somewhat subjective, so YMMV.
Personally, if I were to move from the Bay Area due to cost of living and taxes, I'd be looking at Texas.
I haven't seen that many actual homeless in Portland. Mainly hippies, trustafarians, outdoorsmen, and people posing as homeless in order to make a quick buck.
I presume by "arguably" you mean "I have a bizarrely distorted worldview and therefore I'm going to assert this fact that I have just produced from the depths of my colon."
And the reason those articles stated was that people were leaving for "whiter cities"? I think that's a stretch. The last I heard a lot of people were leaving California because the white collar jobs were leaving California. As I'm sure you're aware, there are more white people working white-collar jobs, so maybe that's the reason, eh?
If those articles said that people were leaving because California wasn't "white enough" or whatever, I'd love to see them.
This is Valley-specific, but the same applies to a lot of metros in California. Portland is at least somewhat convenient to get around.
For me to get from my apartment in San Jose to my office in Palo Alto requires two train trips, one on VTA, one on Caltrain. Both trains are almost always off-schedule (by a lot) and have the shittiest ticketing systems in existence. Not to mention, the train schedules are totally useless (for my needs, at least) if I want to either get up at a reasonable hour, or make my morning meeting.
San Francisco's BART is a lot better, to be fair, although it's still not better than the trains I've been on in a handful of other countries (Canada, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea).
And for all of this glory, the state legislature wants an extra 10% of my paycheck? Right.
California schools are their own unique mess, and that's too long of a rant. Water is also pretty lousy in a lot of areas -- the tap water at my office is on a par with the youth hostel I stayed at in Beijing.
I challenge you to find a place 50 miles outside of the center of any major metropolitan area that lives up to your transit expectations. If you travel the equivalent of San Francisco-San Jose from Portland, you'd be in Salem and would be complaining about the Greyhound.
Having lived in the Bay Area and Italy, I'd give the win to Italy's public transportation hands down. Trains aren't great, and are sometimes late, but there are enough of them that unless there's a major problem, you don't have to worry too much about missing one because another will come along soon.
Also, the system is somewhat rational: trains for longer distance trips, busses for cities, and around the countryside. The train station and bus stations are always connected so that even in a city you don't know, it doesn't take long to figure things out and get where you need to go. The Bay Area is a complete mish-mash of systems. The first thing that comes to everyone's mind when they see it is "why doesn't BART go all around the bay?!".
Yes, the various organizational overlaps, competing interest groups, and projects that had bigger plans than they did bankrolls makes the whole system less functional that it needs to be. Up until quite recently if I had wanted to take public transit from my home (south bay) to the Berkeley I would have needed to take VTA light rail to the San Jose caltrain station, Caltrain to SF (4th & King), SF MUNI to a BART station, and then BART to Berkeley; with the Caltrain/BART connection at SFO I can at least cut the MUNI step out of the process but it is still faster and cheaper to just hop in my car and drive there...
There is a map in the San Jose Diridon Caltrain station, placed right next to the door across from the ramps. After some searching I found someone who took a photo of it here:
It is a very interesting map because it contains the lines of most of the transit authorities in the Bay Area(apparently not all because transit.511.org has more). There are so many that they have to reuse similar colors for a few of them. There are agencies that you probably have never heard of on that map.
That is a scary thing and indicates the true scale of the transit problem - so many overlapping interests, no central authority. And looking at the transit agencies alone doesn't even give us perspective on how many other bureaucracies are getting in the way.
> San Francisco's BART is a lot better, to be fair, although it's still not better than the trains I've been on in a handful of other countries (Canada, mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea).
Trains in mainland China is cheap and fast. In Beijing it is just 2 Yuan to get anywhere by subway! I doubt that any other country has trains that are so cheap.
I am in Portland now and have been for the last nine years. I would say that pdx is a great place for startups if you are a hardware company and/or a venture related to Intel. Other than you will be hard pressed to find qualified SW engineers that are actually can write something else other than drivers. Then there are the occasional VB slackers or .NET potheads that do contract work.
http://calagator.org/
And the quality of discourse at some of these local meet-ups is astonishingly progressive and technical. It feels like Portland's start-up scene isn't the best indicator of our technical culture and potential. Our traditional start-ups stand in the long shadow of Silicon Valley, and may expend too much energy wondering when someone will swoop down and invest.
Portland will make a name for itself by doing business in a much different manner than is done in the valley. The absence of venture capital will force us to invent better models.
BTW, have you guys seen Urban Edibles? It's a collaboratively developed wiki detailing where one can find food growing in Portland's urban areas. http://urbanedibles.org/
My roommate used it to make 3 jars of golden plum jam entirely from foraged fruit.