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Shit that Silicon Forest startups almost said

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:09:58 +0000

Remember a few weeks ago? No. I mean really. Do you remember a few weeks ago? Good. Because I have a hard time remembering that far back sometimes.

Anyway, remember a few weeks about when “Shit [whomever] says” was blowing up as a meme on the Web? Well, in the midst of a meme-fever, it seemed a sure thing that the world needed “Shit Silicon Forest startups say.”

For better or worse, we started the script. But being Portlanders, we fell into the “talk about it but never actually complete it” trap. Call it laziness. Call it “one too many side projects.” Whatever.

Still, the script was pretty good. Maybe. And so we thought you deserved to read it.

Oh and because some of you have bitc… err complained about it before. Fair warning. There’s colorful language ahead.

So here you go:

Shit Silicon Forest Startups Say

Locations: Pie, Teardrop, Barista, Outdoors

Lines:

Whiffies doesn’t sell lemon anymore

I got run over by a tall bike

I think the VC was into us, but we were at Barista so it’s hard to tell

Teardrop. You get funded at Teardrop.

Scott Kveton. You know he can’t touch his shoulders.

Dude. Reed is totally the Stanford of Portland

I totally checked in on Shizzow. Which was Brightkite before Foursquare and Gowalla and shit.

I’m going through Upstart Labs before PIE and then applying to PSF before doing Oregon Angel and Venture NW

I’ve got an angel who’s totally investing as soon as the Jive lockup period expires

@turoczy is such a douche

It’s like an Etsy meets Kickstarter with Urban Airship built on AppFog

Small Society only passed on this project because they got acquired

I heard New Deal’s gin is vegan… and paleo

Sam Adams said my startup is bigger than the tram and streetcar combined

Seriously my new startup? It’s like Jive for Whiiffies meets Urban Airship for Appfog with Puppet on Android for Open Source geeks with big data projects in a coworking space. The Timbers will totally sign on. And Silicon Florist will totally cover it.

This HD app on iPad totally sucks on my iPhone. I blame WalMart

I guess that Android on vending machines in cool. But I really want a Nexus that helps me with beer tap selection.

I’m totally bootstrapping until the utility kilt five finger vibram crowd sees a value in using us for food cart selection.

Thank goodness for identica. How else would I be able to tweet my check in to foursquare on shizzow before +1 my tweet on Google to Facebook on Foursquare…? Fuck. I love open source.

Also? Plurk

Give me a minute on Github. I’m sure we can fix this. Socially.

I think CivicApps can help

Did you post that to Calagator?

I heard Eileen Brady, Jefferson Smith, and Charley Hales all agreed on this one

Portlandia is so… OVER

Really? Sam’s not running for another term?

Is that a double rainbow?

Blogging is the new podcasting.

Isn’t that the Mayor?

Urban Airship will host it.

Puppet will host it.

Blogging is so over.

Is that open source?

I only use open source. Now where the hell is my iPhone?

Did you ride your bike here?

So there you go

You can kind of see it in your head, can’t you? Yeah. And you probably just thought of at least a dozen other phrases. It’s okay. It’s cathartic.

And yes, this was the easy way out. If any of you managed to actually get past the script phase and into production, by all means, we’d love to see that. Because, I mean, we can only rewatch Portlandia so many times.

[Editor: Thanks to @camikaos for her extensive contributions to the script]

(Image courtesy Francis Eatherington. Used under Creative Commons.)

Teacher says every time a company IPOs an angel gets its wings. But sometimes it takes six months.

Rick Turoczy — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 02:35:27 +0000

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.

But we’re getting there. It’s starting to happen. Slowly. And today, we got a huge boost. Jive Software had their IPO today. The first IPO in our region in quite some time.

And it was really successful. And for that they deserve congratulations. Because it’s a big deal. This is huge for these folks. And a bunch them live in Portland. So, that, in turn is big for the Portland startup scene.

Jive made it happen. I could have sworn they were going to be acquired. But they made it to the Street. And that’s an amazing and gut wrenching journey. But mostly amazing.

And Portland should be proud. And we should also be slightly anxious. And champing at the bit.

Because there on the horizon… is our startup scene’s glimpse of maturity. A very very real opportunity for people with startup experience—tech startup experience—to have some disposable (read: invest-able) cash. Some cash they’re willing to risk. To help their friends or their coworkers take a chance on the next big thing.

But that, my friends, is a few months out. Six to be exact.

Why six months? Well, for those of you not familiar with the whole IPO thing. (I mean, it’s been years. Who can blame you?) There’s a little thing called a “lockup period” that stands between us and the next generation of the Portland startup scene.

You see, generally, when a company goes public, the existing shareholders—primarily current employees and former employees—enter into an agreement to not sell their stock for a set period of time. Sometimes it’s three months. Sometimes it’s six months. But whatever the case, it’s a time period where people have stock—or options—but can’t do anything with them. But be patient. And wait.

Once that period expires, they’re free to do what they want. But that waiting period? Well, it can be a little nerve wracking to say the least.

So please, let’s take a moment to bask. To join in reveling in Jive’s accomplishment today. But then, put June 13, 2012, on your calendar. Because that’s six months from today. That’s when the lockup expires. And then get ready. Because if the company can continue to perform, there’s something big coming. A whole bunch of new angels—and potentially startups—for the Portland startup scene.

Here’s looking forward to an interesting summer.

And again, congrats to Bill, Matt, Dave, and all of the other Jivers, past and present. You done us all proud.

CONFIRMED: Jive Software IPO at $12 per share, slated for Tuesday, December 13

Rick Turoczy — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 18:36:28 +0000

There have been a ton of rumors swirling about Jive Software, as of late. But it looks like one of those may have more merit than the others. And given that I’ve seen it any number of places and that our friends at Jive are in the midst of a quiet period, I’m going to share this one.

According to All Things D’s sources, Jive will have its initial public offering on Tuesday, December 13.

Shares of Jive Software, the social enterprise and collaboration software company, will price today and will debut on the Nasdaq exchange tomorrow morning, sources familiar with the matter tell AllThingsD. The debut will cap a process that began in August when it filed its first form S1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

If it happens, it will be one of the biggest things to happen in the Portland startup scene in terms of exits. Especially for a community who has long been awaiting one of their own experiencing a significant liquidity event.

What’s that? Oh yeah. All the hubbub about Jive moving their headquarters to Palo Alto? Well, that’s all well and good. But there’s still a building full of Jive staff sitting in downtown Portland. No matter where their headquarters happens to be.

We’ll just to have to see if it comes to pass. But I know I’ll definitely be tuning in to the opening bell tomorrow.

Here’s the Jive S1 filing.

[UPDATE]

The IPO has been confirmed for Tuesday morning on NASDAQ.

Peeking in on a Portland User Group: Portland JavaScript Admirers

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 23:32:03 +0000

When I first started Silicon Florist, I was hoping to shine some light on startups and events that might not be getting the attention they so richly deserved. I don’t know that I’ve succeeded. But I feel like I’ve at least made a dent.

Now, I’d like to make the same attempt with another under-served and under-recognized population: Portland’s rich and varied user group scene. I mean, there’s a ton of great stuff happening in our user groups. But—unless you’re at every single user group meeting—you can’t really get a feel for just how awesome it is.

So, I’m starting a new series of posts. We’ll be peeking in on user groups in Portland. Taking a look at what they’re mucking with. Listening in our their discussions. And hopefully introducing you to a few groups about which you might not know.

Up first? Portland JavaScript Admirers.

Portland JavaScript Admirers is a group that meets monthly to discuss topics on JavaScript and ECMAscript ranging from client-side web frameworks, to functional and prototypal programming theory. Meetings take place on the fourth Wednesday of every month from 7-9pm at Jive Software.

Notes from the last pdxJS meeting

We had a good discussion of several of the topics presented at JSConf and NodeConf.

Bytes and Blobs by David Flanagan

There are lots of new APIs for accessing binary data from a variety of sources and for manipulating binary data in JavaScript code in the browser. The last slide in the deck has a summary of the sources and sinks that are available. This makes stuff like reading and uploading multiple files without Flash possible.

Binary data that is available to JavaScript code can be sent to APIs that take URLs using blob URIs. These do not embed data like data URIs do – instead they point to cached binary data in memory or on disk.

Using a webkit-specific API you can construct binary data in JavaScript. You can use this for stuff like audio synthesis. With the right know-how or libraries you can synthesize binary WAV data and send that data to the HTML5 audio API as a blob URI.

There is another webkit API that creates a local filesystem that your web app has access to. From what I understand this API does not give the browser access to your real filesystem. Instead it creates space for files to be saved on disk just for that web page. There is a flag that switches between a transient filesystem, which goes away when the browser window closes, and a persistent filesystem, which will keep those files on disk indefinitely until the web app or the user removes them.

Everything is Permitted – Extending Natives by Andrew Dupont

In this talk Andrew Dupont argued that extending built-in types in JavaScript can be a good thing, provided certain precautions are taken. He pointed out that core extensions are common practice in Ruby. And he suggested using the ECMAScript 1.5 Object.defineProperty() method for creating non-enumerable object properties as a safe way to extend the Object prototype without breaking code that iterates over object properties using for…in loops. Other ways to work around that problem are to put hasOwnProperty() checks in loops or to use the ECMAScript 1.5 Object.keys() for iterating properties. Object.keys() has the advantage that it can be implemented in earlier versions of JavaScript using a polyfill.

This discussion of ECMAScript 1.5 features resulted in a request that I repost slides from a talk that I gave a while ago on that topic. Those slides are available here.

The group was not entirely in agreement that extending core types is a good practice. Though I did not hear objections to the idea of using core extensions to port newer, standardized, language features to JavaScript implementations that do not support them. As I learned from JSConf, the kind of library that adds language features that you expect to a language implementation that lacks said features is called a polyfill.

The Future Is Modules Not Frameworks by John Hann

John Hann argued that distributing JavaScript libraries as small, single-purpose modules offers sufficient advantages to make modules preferable to monolithic frameworks like jQuery, Prototype, and so on. With small modules you can mix and match different implementations and pare down your application footprint to just the dependencies that you really need.

Small modules could benefit from the use of something like the CommonJS module specification, which makes it easier to work with lots of libraries in one application without scope pollution. Though that brings up a question of exactly what a browser module should look like. A straight translation of the module definition that is intended for server-side code may not be the best option.

Ender.js is a recently-created tool for building collections of small modules into frameworks. Ender offers a convention for organizing a module so that it can be easily included in lots of projects.
microjs is a list small, focused JavaScript
modules. It organizes modules by use case.

Node v0.5 Roadmap – Ryan Dahl

The node team is hard at work on porting node to Windows. In the process they are abstracting the under-the-hood components to make the platform-specific portion of node as small as possible. Some choice quotes from the slides:

Why is porting to Windows a priority?

The goal of Node, as with any programming platform, is total world domination.

and:

If we can’t get at least gigabit throughput from a TCP pair over loopback on every OS, we’ve failed.

If we can’t have 10,000 idle sockets connected to a server and use less than 100mb RSS on every OS, we’ve failed.

The slides discuss some of the hurdles and nice bits of writing non-blocking code in Windows.

A point came up in our discussion that a common comment on Node is, “why would I need that many connections open at once?” The answer is that that kind of question stems from the traditional approach to web applications where a client connects, is served a response as fast as possible, and disconnects. Node is aimed at a new style of application – or at least a style that is new to high-scale web applications – where clients are constantly connected to the server via websockets or comet.

dnode: freestyle rpc – James Halliday

dnode is a new RPC protocol. It is built on JSON and has implementations in Node and in some other languages. The particular advantage of dnode is that it allows clients to serialize procedures to be executed on the other side of a connection. That process can be arbitrarily nested: a service receiving a serialized procedure can pass that procedure as an argument to another serialized procedure that is passed to another endpoint.

Creating Node Addons – Marco Rogers

This talk introduces some of the details of implementing Node addons at the C/C++ layer. Writing addons in C instead of in pure JavaScript lets you add new capabilities that are not provided by the core modules. It also lets you reuse code from the vast repositories of existing C and C++ libraries that exist. For example, instead of rewriting AES in JavaScript you could pull an existing AES implementation into a Node addon.

npm supports packages that include C and C++ code. Currently that involves packaging up the source code; when a user installs the package the binary component is built from source. In the interest of bringing Node to Windows, and since Windows users are less likely than *nix users to have access to a decent compiler toolchain, work is underway to support precompiled binary components in npm packages.

We also talked a bit about Google Chrome OS. Specifically, the ability that Chrome and Chrome OS have to run web applications that include binary components. If a web app is installed from the Chrome store – that is, if the user has accepted the app manifest that grants the app permission to run binary code – then the app can download and run binary code. The binary code is still limited by the restrictions of the page sandbox. And the browser does perform a verification step to make sure that the binary code does not contain any dangerous instructions that could break sandbox isolation.

Next up for Portland JavaScript Admirers (pdxjs)

The next meeting will be held Wednesday, June 22 from 7 PM to 9 PM. For more information, visit Portland JavaScript Admirers or join the Portland JavaScript Admirers Google Group.

Interested in having your Portland User Group featured in Silicon Florist? Drop me a line at siliconflorist@gmail.com with your notes, and I’ll be happy to post them.

Jive talkin’: Tony Zingale, CEO of Jive Software, sits down with CNBC

Rick Turoczy — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 15:37:25 +0000

I’ll be honest. I can’t have a conversation about startups in Portland without a mention of Jive Software. And come down where you will on the religious argument of the location of their headquarters (I could give you my opinion, but that’s another post for another time), they’re still a very big player here in the Portland scene. In fact, any number of people helping lead the startup scene around here have been through Jive—and there’s still a huge pool of talent sitting there on a day-to-day basis.

But how many of us really know what Jive is doing and has plans to do? Well, CNBC caught up with Jive CEO Tony Zingale to get his perspective. Here’s that he had to say.

For more on the company and its products, visit Jive Software, like Jive Software on Facebook, or follow @jivesoftware on Twitter.

Jive Software is in a (deeper) relationship with Facebook ♥

Rick Turoczy — Tue, 17 May 2011 15:59:46 +0000

You know Jive Software, right? The still pretty much a Portland company that leads the whole social business software market? Well, leaders need to keep moving. And as such, Jive is getting even more social.

This morning, Jive unveiled a Facebook connector that allows businesses to better manage their external Jive network and their Facebook presence—all from within Jive.

According to TechCrunch:

Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive’s software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, and social networking features and more.

Jive’s Facebook Connector allows companies to integrate customer interactions and information residing on a company or brand’s Facebook page in Jive’s customer communities. Once connected, content generated in Facebook will be replicated and available in the Jive customer community.

How’s it work? Let’s take a look.

Pretty cool. And also showing how managing the social media presence for a company is becoming a critical business need for forward thinking companies.

For more on the connector, read the Jive press release. For more information, visit Jive Software.

Portland startups get a little love: Geoloqi wins at AppNation, PHP Fog wins at Under the Radar

Rick Turoczy — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 00:51:03 +0000

Oh lookie there. While I’m busy whining about Portland startups not getting the respect they deserve, what happens? Well some them go out and actually get the respect they deserve. Go figure.

That’s right. Seems that two Portland startups garnered some love and attention, this week. Location service Geoloqi won the AppNation Best New App award and PHP Fog won the Audience Choice at Under the Radar.

Whosa howsa what? Okay. Let’s step back and see who these folks are and what they’ve won.

First up, Geoloqi.

Geoloqi is a private, real-time mobile and web platform for securely sharing location data, with features such as Geonotes, proximal notification, and sharing real-time GPS maps with friends.

And they took home the Best New App at AppNation. Portlanders Matt Tucker of Jive and Scott Kveton of Urban Airship were both there. And former Portlander Di-Ann Eisnor was helping put the conference on. But what, exactly, is AppNation you ask? (That’s honestly a good question, because I’ll be damned if I could find the information on their site.)

APPNATION is all about helping you grow your business. From expert workshops on discoverability to monetization to having the opportunity to meet new partners, possible investors, and development clients, we created this show to help you build a great business in this exciting new marketplace.

So that’s Geoloqi. Boom. Winning down in San Francisco. What about PHP Fog?

PHP Fog is the best cloud hosting platform for PHP. We provide a reliable, scalable, fast PHP service using all the latest cloud technology.

Best of all, it works perfectly with all your existing PHP applications. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla or even frameworks like Zend, Cake and Kohana all work seamlessly.

And they walked away as the Audience Favorite at Under the Radar. Which is?

Under The Radar is the leading business development conference that brings together early stage startups and buyers of innovative technology for one purpose: getting deals done. Attendees are responsible for leveraging innovation for competitive advantage in the fast-evolving digital landscape. Notable deals with roots at Under The Radar include the acquisitions of Heroku to Salesforce and Cloudkick to Rackspace.

And here’s the PHP Fog presentation.

Video streaming by Ustream

Congrats to both companies. And to Portland for getting a little of the recognition it so richly deserves.

(Image courtesy Snap®. Used under Creative Commons.)

CIO for the State of Oregon Dugan Petty wins innovation award for Jive Software implementation

Rick Turoczy — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 22:32:41 +0000

We in Portland are quick to trumpet our tech scene, our community, and our forward thinking. But while we’re often happy to point to things the city is doing, it’s rare that we take that bragging to the state level.

Well, turns out Oregon’s CIO Dugan Petty is no slouch. Turns out, he was recently recognized as one of the “Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers” by Government Technology magazine and Center for Digital Government.

Ironically enough, he earned that recognition for a using products from Jive Software—a company some folks love to critique for moving their headquarters out of Oregon. (I, for one, am not one of those folks.)

Petty specifically led Oregon’s development of Oregon GovSpace, a Jive-powered internal and external social business community to engage with state agencies, boards, commissions and their business partners. The platform launched in early 2008 with just under 200 individual accounts. In a little over a year, the community grew to reach 1,503 individual accounts. Two years later, the community has 4,803 individual accounts, representing over 231 different state, local and national organizations who work directly with State of Oregon agencies.

But what exactly did they manage to accomplish with this installation? The department managed to eliminated a bunch of meetings, provided a repository for capturing and tracking ideas, and wound up building a more efficient and cost effective planning process.

Not bad. Your tax dollars at work. And I’m not being facetious. Kind of hearkens back to that whole dogfood conversation, doesn’t it?

“GovSpace has been critical to Oregon because it connects our thousands of members and has transformed the way we engage and collaborate across the state,” said Dugan in a press release. “Jive was key as it allows us to build internal and external communities and help generate real business value through Social Business.”

Interested in hearing more from Dugan? Well, you’re in luck. Deb Bryant interviewed him at last year’s GOSCON for Open Affairs Television.

For more, read Jive’s press release on the Oregon CIO.

Why I broke up with Portland to build my startup… and why we’re back together

Bubs — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 17:14:43 +0000

[Editor: It’s been a while since we’ve had a guest post from Darius Monsef, founder of COLOURlovers (one of the first Portland Web startups I started following here on Silicon Florist). Want to hear more from Darius? Swing by PIE on Tuesday afternoon.]

She was a dream city with everything I hoped for. I was willing to work long hours and scrape by on the leanest of incomes to make things work. I tried again and again… but ended up having to abandon her to find real opportunities in new cities. On my journey I travelled to the mystical land of Startups. I saw over the wall into the secret garden and I’ve returned home to share what I’ve learned… and to be happily together with PDX again.

Falling In Love With Portland.

Before my story of leaving Portland begins, it helps to know how I got here. After leaving my childhood home in Hawaii and moving to Boston for college, I realized that the itch to build things was greater than my desire to be in a classroom and took a job with a small web design and development shop in Portland. (My mother’s side of the family has always been in Portland and I’d visited often growing up.) It was at this small shop that I cut my teeth building dynamic sites and services.

COLOURlovers was born one long weekend from two parents: Experimentation & Inspiration. I mocked up a design and wrote the code to allow people to choose a color, name it and then let others rate and comment on it. (HotOrNot.com for Color.)

This was a social experiment to see how others might see colors differently. Do you absolutely love this color? Does this one make you vomit in your mouth a little? When the MVP (minimum viable product—I didn’t use or know this term at the time) was working I shared it with a flash community I was a member of and started getting great feedback. From there I added the ability to add a color combination of 2 to 5 colors as a palette. And with that the site became more than just a rating site and an inspiration source for people looking for color ideas to jumpstart their projects.

tl;dw: Five weeks after I built COLOURlovers v.1 I left to Thailand to volunteer for a month after the Tsunami struck. I ended up staying for 5 months and cofounding an international relief organization. (LO Review Story.) After two years I stepped down from operations of the organization to return to tech and try and hit my home-run. So I can do that much more good in the world.

Breaking Up With Portland.

After returning to Portland, I took a small family angel investment to hire a developer much better than me to take over building the site. In its current state, tt was falling on its knees from continued organic growth combined with my shoddy coding. I found a local developer on craiglist and hired him to rewrite things. (Chris is now a partner in COLOURlovers and has written all the code that makes the site run now.) I started going to local startups events to meet other founders. I went to pitching events to try and meet investors. I wrote for blogs like this to get awareness in Portland. And the more I tried to really make something happen the more I realized that Portland and I needed to see other people.

I don’t love being Darius Downer and crapping on the Portland web startup scene, but somebody needs to critique what needs to be critiqued and bullshit needs to be called what it is. I care very much about Portland and would love to see the startup scene change, both for my own company and for every other founder hungry to build their ideas here. But Portland is not a great town for startup founders right now. And it won’t change from the top down. We as this generation of founders need to bleed more to make the road easier for the next to walk.

So, if I can help any of my fellow founders please let me know. I’ll bleed with you.

A Startup Community Needs 4 Things: Ideas, Talent, Ambition, and Capital.

We have amazing people with great ideas in Portland, some of the best creative comes out of this town. Portland also has skilled tech folks. We’re hiring our team out of Portland for this reason. And it isn’t like nobody has ever made it big out of Portland, there are several great PDX web companies (Urban Airship, Kongregate, and Jive Software, for example) whose ambitious founders overcame what obstacles were in their way.

What Portland doesn’t have is capital. Founder friendly, fast moving seed capital. I tried raising money in Portland—granted it was a couple years ago—but all I got was dicked around by a VC that didn’t really have money to invest and ended up just using me as a screen to social proof leads. And from the outside, my inexperienced and misguided attempts to pitch valley investors went nowhere.

A Startup Community Doesn’t Need 4 Things: Coaches, Advisors, Hired Guns, The Cullens

It totally makes sense that somebody would want to see that you’re willing to bleed for your ideas to test your commitment & passion. But run away from people asking you to bleed into their mouths. There is some truth in “those who can’t do teach…” And many of the people out there selling their coaching / advising skills haven’t had any material success in the space where they espouse wisdom. Be very wary of any coach who needs your money.

Coaches are on the same spectrum as advisors and investors… but not on the end you want. Paul Graham once cautioned me about advisors: “Be careful about getting advisors. An advisor is just somebody who doesn’t believe in you or your idea enough to invest in it.”

And a hired coach is somebody that is primarily motivated by your cash. If they truly believed in what you were doing, they’d invest in you.

Coaches < Advisors < Investors < Baby Unicorns

With that being said, we do have two official advisors. Both are active entrepreneurs who have a ton of amazing experience. They’ve continued to give me advice and support without asking for anything in return. In appreciation for their time and their continued support, we made them advisors. I also have dozens of fellow founders that I count as advisors. Which brings up another piece of wisdom: Get advice from people actively in the game.

The kind of mentors, coaches, and advisors (incubators included) you want the most are people who are invested in you and your success. And their are tons of amazing successful entrepreneurs and investors out there actively investing in startups. You just might have to look outside of Portland to find them. I highly recommend Angel.co and am happy to help any startup ready to start pitching investors refine their pitch and put together a funding strategy.

(Full Disclosure. I was once on Team Edward, trying to survive as a bootstrapping entrepreneur by coaching other startups for cash. I hopefully gave greater value from my lessons learned than the blood I drank.)

And along with the for hire coaches there are organizations that I think could do a lot more to help web startup founders:

SCORE

Most startup founders don’t know SCORE, because it is a dinosaur of an organization that is meant to help small business owners get started. While this may be useful for brick & mortar / mom & pop shops. It is not at all helpful to internet startup founders.

I reached out to SCORE to help get business plan advice and fundraising help. I was matched up with an older businessman and met him at the their offices. Only a short while into my meeting with this “advisor,” he told me that he couldn’t help me through SCORE, but if I worked with him outside of SCORE (gave him equity & finders fee) he could help me get investment.

The internet world moves fast. Hell, I’m only pushing 30 and I feel like an old dog in this game. SCORE doesn’t have advisors who understand the current web startup world and will have little value to provide you as a founder.

OTBC

While better than SCORE, I don’t think OTBC is providing the value it can be to the startup web scene. I think they are a great resource to hardware, biotech, and physical product companies. But if OTBC really cared about helping Portland web founders, they’d be networking their faces off with SF & NYC investors and other successful startups. They’d be deal makers and intro-magicians helping Portland founders meet the investors they need and get partnerships off the ground with other successful companies.

I was a paying member for a couple years. I went to several of their events. One even I went to was a business plan writing workshop (FYI, you don’t need a business plan. AT ALL.) and I approached the speaker to introduce myself and get some specific feedback. He blew me off.

OEN

Like OTBC I think OEN provides real value to companies outside of the web startup scene. Their beauty pageant events will waste your time. Time if you invested building your MVP, you’d be launched.

Seeing Other Cities.

While bootstrapping COLOURlovers in PDX, struggling to raise, and take things to the next level I was recruited by the team at Microsoft working on Photosynth. I accepted the offer to move up to Seattle and head up building community and web product for their killer application, thinking that I could use the serious increase in pay to fund my startup and use my spare time to work on things.

I overestimated how far the extra cash would take me and underestimated how taxing a day working in middle management at MSFT would be. I wasn’t able to engage the startup scene in Seattle much but I was able to bang out a new project while up north (Friendscall.Me) and ultimately get it acquired.

With my entrepreneurial soul being sucked dry in Seattle, and with the extra motivation of an amazing woman (now my wife) I moved to San Francisco to live the startup dream.

San Francsico has been amazing. Even before getting into Y Combinator, simply having a city made up of founder peers was opening my eyes. (I wrote about the values of doing Y Combinator here.)

Not to overhype it, just honestly… SF has been like Disneyworld for me as a founder. But I still love Portland and think it can be a Disneyland. Let’s make some magic happen.

Make-Up Love’n with Portland.

I’ve wanted to share a lot of these thoughts for a very long time, but felt like I needed to exhaust my options, try every service I could, and prove things out before making any critiques.

Well, I love Portland. I REALLY want to see it thrive as a startup hub. We just raised a large seed round from some of the top VCs and Angels. We’re hiring here in Portland and supporting the local economy. And while SF will continue to be my homebase, I’ll be in Portland often and supporting the startup community as much as I can.

I realize that there are a lot of service providers here in town, the coaches and the advisors that are not going to like what I have to say. And trust me, being critical is not one of my favorite things. I’ve built my personal brand around LOVE!

But I’m not here for them. I’m here for my fellow founders and I’ll take your flames to support them.

If you have a startup that you’re bleeding for. Come bleed with me. I’ll do all I can to support you. And with the success of this generation, we’ll grow a thriving startup community in Portland.

Darius Monsef can be reached via his blog, COLOURlovers, or as @bubs on Twitter.

(Image courtesy Iwona Erskine-Kellie. Used under Creative Commons.)

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