The winner will get a chance to hype its company and city at a global entrepreneurship conference.
BY JACOB PALMER | DIGITAL NEWS EDITOR
The winner of a Portland Development Commission contest will get a chance to hype its company and city at a global entrepreneurship conference.
Whoever the PDC selects will get booth space at the conference expo, event entry, and accommodations, the Portland Business Journal reports.
The PDC’s contest builds on its work with the Startup PDX Challenge, which aims to accelerate startups. This year the program is focused on companies being built by diverse founding teams. The PDC has the resources to bring three people as part of this contest, said Jared Wiener, software industry liaison and senior project manager. The application process ends at noon on April 30. The winners will be announced May 4. The conference is May 15 and May 16 in Santa Clara, California. As part of the contest’s impetus, PDC points to growing Portland companies such as Simple and Cozy, which started elsewhere but moved to the Rose City while their teams were still small.
“We want to make sure everyone is aware of Portland. The conference has 5,000 attendees, many are entrepreneurs,” Wiener said. “Once companies get to a certain size they can move a team of, say, five here and grow.”
The following verticals will be included at TiEcon:
- Security
- Health care
- Cloud
- Internet of Things
- Data economy
Act-On Software, Nouvola and CloudEngage (among others) will be at the conference, according to PBJ.
A recent WalletHub study found that Portland isn’t the best place to start a business.
And, that may be an understatement as Portland finished 139th in the 2015 Best Cities to Start a Business study.
From Portland Business Journal:
WalletHub used 13 metrics in devising the ratings. Portland ranked 72nd in the depth of its employee pool, 120th in terms of cost of living, 126th in a “hardest working population” measure,” 132nd in access to financing and 138th in terms of number of small businesses per capita.
Shreveport, Louisiana topped the list while Tulsa, Oklahoma ranked second.
The entire West Coast did not fare well in the study: Seattle finished 125th, San Francisco was 130th. Spokane (20th) finished the best out of the cities ranked from the three West Coast states. Of the bottom 14 in the 150-city list, 11 of them were from the West Coast.
