Today I’m feeling as giddy as a schoolgirl. Why, because today I get to officially announce two new members of our Portland staff.

Dan Blaker officially joins our team as our Project Manager, becoming the third Portland based member of our team. Dan’s going to be starting on our project with UGreekRow, as well as being our resident musicologist in the Portland office. Dan and Micheal now get to officially fight it out over who the best DJ is at Intrigo.

We couldn’t be more excited about having Dan join our team. His experience, talent, and personality are perfect fits, and attest again to why we love Portland and its people so much. Not to mention, Dan become the first ever Dad to be a part of the Intrigo team!

Also big news is another member of our Tucson team, Fadi Chalfoun, has officially announced he’s moving to Portland with us. Fadi had worked as a developer for us throughout his college career, and will now be joining us full time in the Portland office. He’s already done a ton of work on projects such as On Demand Safety, and soon to be launched projects Notehall and Casa Video. Expect to see him tagging along with us as we begin our migration this summer. By the way, Guillaume’s move is now only about two weeks away. The office is starting to fill up, and we couldn’t be happier about it.

People of Portland prepare yourselves, here we come!

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.

The Intrigo Team is proud to sponsor BarCamp Portland.  Starting Saturday, May 3, Portland’s tech community will be gathering at CubeSpace for an open forum where we can get together to share and learn.  All of us at Intrigo are excited about the opportunity to meet all of the interesting folks, and being a part of the amazing tech community in Portland. 

Make sure you get a chance to come to the event, and say hi to the Intrigo Team while you’re there!