Archives for January 2012

After opening with a perhaps inevitable Portlandia reference, the Wall Street Journal blog Venture Capital Dispatch praises Portland’s up-and-coming status as a hotbed of high tech start-ups in a post titled Portland Makes Bid To Become Budding Techlandia.

Thanks to the quirky TV show “Portlandia,” Portland, Ore., is better known for its tattoos and its gluten-free bakeries than for its tech scene. But it does have a tech scene, and a growing one at that.

In less than three years, Portland had become home to three incubators for tech start-ups—the Portland Seed Fund, backed by various city and state agencies; the Portland Incubator Experiment, backed by Nike Inc.’s advertising agency, Wieden + Kennedy, with sponsorships from Coca-Cola, Target Brands and Google; and Upstart Labs, which is just starting out.

In the post Silicon Florist‘s Rick Turoczy, who co-founded the Portland Incubator Experiment a couple years ago, comments on what makes Portland’s startup culture different:

“For so long, we’ve been watching the Bay Area or Seattle, learning what those start-up communities have done well, and we’ve learned from their mistakes,” Turoczy said. “We’re ready to start coming into our own, and we’re seeing significant investments in start-ups in town.”

Read the rest at Venture Capital Dispatch, and visit Silicon Florist for more on the blossoming startup industry in Portland, Oregon and the Silicon Forest.