After hearing about Eric and Nathan’s experience at Bar Camp, I started my morning read. Today I started with a little tidbit from Silicon Florist which got me pumped. This usually happens when I read about how great Portland is.
Sidenote: Understand that Intrigo’s expansion and eventual move to Portland is the riskiest endeavor we’ve tried. Moving employees, duplicating infrastructure, adding more rent, and the yada yada made it a (go and get a football mouth piece to keep me from grinding my teeth to the gum line) riskixiting (risky:exciting) experience. Six month’s later: I’m pumped. And this city keeps pumping.
…and pumping. Since Intrigo has moved offices to Portland, the substantial amount of tech resources to both pull and contribute to trumps any other city I’ve been intimate with. Portland is an enabler, connector, grower, and supporter of it’s business residents. I can’t say this about Tucson or any other (unnamed) cities.
To delve further, we are a company that doesn’t advertise. We require word of mouth to succeed. We actively choose to be noncompetitive while stressing collaboration with typical competitors. In Tucson, we collaborate with ONE company (www.anchorwave.com) because there is only ONE company. So when Nathan and I calculated that ONE company was one more than zero companies, we sought a new city. If you want to dominate the $2-6K, poorly designed Tucson website business, close up shop, convince a mediocre designer to move, and move to T-town. While monopolization sounds simple, your company and it’s employees will lack the innovation and tech community interaction needed to be sustainable. I must stress, there is success in any other city (including Tucson), but in Portland, a business’ people find fulfillment. And it’s all about people. Those Portland igniters we’ve recently collaborated with demonstrate a business climate foreign and uncomfortable to many in our industry. But that climate is what we need and it’s what the web has and will become.
