Speaker - Rick Turoczy

Rick Turoczy has been working in, on, and around the Portland, Oregon, startup community for 30 years. He has been recognized as one of the “OG”s of startup ecosystem building by the Kauffman Foundation, has shared insights in the book The Startup Community Way, and has been humbled by any number of opportunities to speak on stages from SXSW to Kobe to Muscat, including an opportunity to share his views on community building on the TEDxPortland stage (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cj98mr_wUA0). As founder and editor of Silicon Florist (https://siliconflorist.com/), he has blogged about Portland startups for nearly 20 years — even though numerous people have begged him to stop. That side project led Rick to start PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment) (https://piepdx.com/), an ongoing experiment exploring the potential for mutually beneficial collaborations between the Portland startup community and more well-established entities like corporations, government organizations, and educational institutions.