Igniting Portland’s Tech Community

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Around the world geeks have been putting together Ignite nights to show their answers.

Ignite Portland 2 takes place tonight at the Baghdad Theatre and it promises to be a full house – it’s #2 on the most popular event list on Upcoming behind SXSW Interactive. This second iteration should be triple the size of the inaugural event and will no doubt confirm that Portland deserves it’s Silicon Forest moniker. Chris Logan’s presentation in the first wave – Time for Portland to Take its place – should drive the message home.

Portland per capita has more College degrees, has more reciently arrived young educated people, has more smart engineers, has more computers, has more bandwidth, spends more time outdoors, has a smaller eco foot print, buys more books, drinks more beer, sees more strippers, sips more wine, and eats more great restaurant food.

This should be the fuel to make great and large companies. Yet we get less venture capital, have fewer public companies, and build fewer successful companies. I will document these facts and suggest some simple ideas on how we can step up and bask in the success we deserve.

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